S1 EP35 - 2023 MWC Barcelona Wrap Up

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Hey, Peter, it's great to have you back on the podcast. I'm really looking forward to our discussion today. Got a lot to talk about. First thought we could start off with what were some of your general impressions from mobile world Barcelona 2023?

day MWC marathon. But putting aside all the work that goes into the glitzy demos and driving new content, the news cycle and all that this year was really all about being back in person and the hundreds of face to face interactions we had with booth visitors and in scheduled customer partner and operator meetings.

business units. This included our recently announced Octeon 10 Fusion processor families, the industry's first 5nm baseband platform, as well as other OCTEON 10 products they're used for accelerating L2 L3 processing and critical core network functions like the new 5G user plain gold, otherwise

known as ups. On the transport side we showcase optical DSPS and the Prestera switch solution which is optimized for fronthaul mid Hall and backhaul and and we had a new demo of our new Liquid Security 2 (LS2) adapter, which is also built on Marvell Technology as trusted by the world's largest hyperscale clouds. And we demonstrated five key use cases for 5G security from literally at the edge IoT devices in terms of e sim and sim security all the way to the

5G core network. So with the virtualization of 5G networks, cloud optimized hardware security modules are really becoming mission critical for a wide range of applications.

fusion processor. And we also had a joint reference design that we did with Analog Devices, which featured a massive MIMO radio unit powered by the new Marvell OCTEON 10 Fusion processor. And that really highlighted best in class energy for very advanced, massive MIMO radios that support up to 32 or more transmit and receive antennas. And we also had about 10 customers and partners exhibiting RAN products and designs based on our Octeon fusion baseband processor

throughout the show floor. I was told they were actually more than 10 but I personally counted Nokia, Samsung two at Dell, Vodafone, Arm, Wind River, VMware Arraycom and of course ADI also had a mirror image of what we display, but they had a live demo along with it as well. And I would like to also point out that these partner displays included not just the radio unit, but the lien share of them were distributed units and actually included both traditional and cloud native

type systems. Another area that we got a lot of attention on was open fronthaul products that are powered by our pristera Switch silicon which were showcased in four different customer partner booths around MWC in addition to showing off some of that at our booth as well, but open RAN is actually helping to diversify fronthaul vendors with new interoperable high performance sellside gateways from the likes of Pegatron and other vendors.

And our fronthaul switching products covered not only the mainstream, but emerging 5G industrial IoT applications as well. These were all on display as well at this year's MWC.

transformation overnight. I say overnight, I mean Sunday, the eve of the show, to a much more modern and colorful image representing the you know, the company's core values that really distinguish them among infrastructure vendors and really make us proud to be one

of their key partners. And if Nokia's rebrand itself didn't steal the show that the next morning they, they announced their any RAN ecosystem, which included the top three hyperscale cloud providers and the top three data center server vendors, and that really put them over the top and actually helped plan Pekka Lundmark, their CEO at the top of GSMA's list of the show's biggest influencers, which is an amazing feat considering all the other industry luminaries that were

there like Martin Cooper, who wound up number two on the list. He's the father of the cell phone celebrating the upcoming 50th anniversary of the industry's first call, which is kind of the industry's big bang moment. And so why do I call

this out? It really is because you know cloud service providers presence this year at the show was felt much more than any previous year, and Nokia's any RAN ecosystem, which Marvell is part of really highlights two of Nokia's real unique leadership points in his commitment to drive the best in class ran solutions for all architectures not just cloud RAN, not just traditional RAN but also the recognition of the value that their strategic partners bring to the table, especially from

the cloud ecosystem. And this is not just for Nokia, but also for Marvell, we did a lot of integration work with the top cloud software management companies like Wind River, Red Hat and VMware and featured a lot of this at show as well. And you know, these these latter points are really particularly important in the presence of marketing disruptions that are happening right now in 5G Cloud convergence.

Having done trials sitting on the side recognizing and discussing kind of the mountain of things that need to happen before you can actually scale these kinds of systems. And a very strong and growing recognition that general purpose processors, which really the predecessors, for the early systems really don't quite cut it in terms of delivering the kind of performance that carriers expect today, which is equivalent to the established leading edge networks of the

world in 5G. And so this give an added momentum to a new crop of open standards based vRAN accelerator cards, led by our customers using OCTEON 10 Fusion, including Nokia, Samsung, Dell, Fujitsu and others. That MWC our customers showed up in full force, they're shining a spotlight on really what made this industry so successful in first place, driving best in class connectivity experience that we all take for granted, regardless of what G are we're on, or what the underlying architecture is.

And how they're doing that is by using the same baseband silicon in there open vRAN solutions that are already deployed at scale in the most advanced 5G networks around the world. And that is driven by OCTEON fusion technology. And this is really starting to resonate with carriers.

footprint. And most of this is in the very edge of the network. In the radio. We're increasing massive MIMO complexity is really driving demands on processor, complexity and power consumption. And so we produced a video that showed the practical downstream energy savings benefits for our customers with our optimized silicon and advanced power management techniques and

process node leadership. And partners like ADI, which had the live demo of our joint massive MIMO radio unit reference design, had hands on displays to show how the 40% power reduction enables not only lower total cost of ownership and energy efficiency, but also leads to much smaller lower cost units that can be mounted virtually anywhere. And that's a critical consideration in the expansion

of 5G coverage. Quantum computing was another interesting topic that grabbed a lot of attention from passers by at our booth primarily because the words quantum computing happened to be used in one of our security demos in one of the slides. And I drew a lot of people in the booth, wondering what we're doing in that area. So it seemed to be top of mind

for a lot of visitors. The context in our case was really the importance of rethinking network security and 5G in a post quantum computing world where the most sophisticated encryption algorithms can be broken with the world's most powerful computers that exist today. And this comes in what is already a heightened mobile security risk environment, and literally from the edge to the

core. And so the crypto agility and performance of our Liquid security 2 hardware security modules, really enables a firmware update to support post quantum crypto algorithms when they become standardized. And that will be happening over the next year or two. And you know, this was only one of five security use cases that we highlighted for HSMs in the 5G world, but the probably more important for the longer term future.