5G Baseband: Apple And Samsung Have No Agreement Reached
5G Baseband: Apple And Samsung Have No Agreement Reached Due to Supply Issues
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Apple Once Held Negotiations with Samsung for 5G Baseband Collaboration: No Agreement Reached Due to Supply Issues.
Over the past few years, Apple has been diligently working on developing its own 5G modem.
While they spent a billion dollars in 2019 to acquire Intel’s smartphone chip business to expedite this project, it appears to have provided limited assistance.
With their in-house 5G baseband project facing repeated delays, Apple was forced to continue its partnership with Qualcomm, renewing a three-year agreement that will see Qualcomm providing baseband chips for iPhones until 2026.
According to reports from Hankyung, before Apple opted to continue collaborating with Qualcomm, they initiated discussions with Samsung regarding a potential partnership for 5G baseband technology.
It is understood that in 2019, Apple turned to Samsung for alternative solutions when negotiations with Qualcomm hit a roadblock.
However, these talks didn’t progress significantly, purportedly due to supply-related issues on Samsung’s end.
They couldn’t produce a sufficient quantity of 5G modems, resulting in unsatisfactory outcomes and preventing the establishment of a partnership.
This situation forced Apple to return to Qualcomm, albeit at a higher cost. Some speculate that this could be related to Samsung’s semiconductor technology not matching up to that of TSMC.
In fact, Samsung’s 5G baseband is slower and less energy-efficient compared to Qualcomm’s products, resulting in poorer battery life.
There were reports suggesting that Apple initially considered procuring Samsung’s 5G baseband for use in some older iPhone models.
Even if an agreement had been reached, Apple would have had to contend with other challenges, such as ensuring compliance with stringent connectivity regulations worldwide, each region having different conditions and standards.
These variables would have posed significant optimization challenges, potentially further undermining the performance of the modems.
Previously, reports indicated that Apple’s in-house 5G modem prototype had subpar performance, being both slow and prone to overheating, while also requiring a substantial amount of internal space.
Apple’s management team and engineers have now come to realize that developing a 5G modem appears to be even more challenging than their in-house Arm-based chip designs, given the multitude of complex issues involved.
