Towards Future 6G from the Hardware Components Perspective – A Focus on the Hardware-Software Divide, its Limiting Factors and the Envisioned Benefits in Going Beyond it

The future paradigms of 6G and Tactile Internet (TI) will extensively capitalize on Artificial Intelligence (AI), broaden services and functionalities, while requiring the 6G network infrastructure itself to develop unparalleled concepts, like self-sustenance and self-evolution. This work argues that the classical Hardware-Software (HW-SW) design approaches, effective for decades and still in use today, will not be suitable anymore in realizing the 6G self-evolving network. To this end, in the following pages a reformulation of the HW-SW concept and relationships is suggested, in order to overcome the limitations arising from the so-called HW-SW divide. In particular, increase in separation and symmetry between HW and SW are identified as key-solutions to empower the AI-driven 6G.