"On April 16, 2019 us time, Intel announced that it would abandon the 5g baseband modem service. The news of the iPhone's return to Qualcomm was released, and Qualcomm's stock soared nearly 25% within an hour.
Introduction
When Joe helped the owner release the first generation iPhone 12 years ago, he was still not confident. Jobs rehearsed for six days before the press conference, but there were many problems: the iPhone could not make a phone call or go online. Worse, the baseband chip provided by Infineon did not even support 3G, while Nokia and Motorola had 3G mobile phones four or five years earlier.
In order to catch up with the operator at & T's summer file and finalize the binding contract, jobs had to release the iPhone generation in advance: a semi-finished product, a music player that can only make calls, because it has no app store, can't install software, and can't input Chinese characters, and its sale will not start until half a year later.
The hasty release of the iPhone gave Google enough time to imitate and learn from the iPhone, and fully caught up with the progress of the iPhone when the first generation Android was released, providing 3G support and app store directly. Since then, Android's market share has soared, leaving the iPhone behind. Joe Gang, who originally thought he was far ahead for at least two years, said angrily: "I want to use up Apple's $40 billion deposit and launch a thermonuclear war to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product.”
Looking back, why did Apple choose Infineon, which was not a leader at that time, as the main communication chip provider? New friends in the semiconductor industry may not know the fierce competition of mobile phone chips in the 2g-3g era. Let's review it slowly.
1、 Heroes compete for hegemony
In the era of analog mobile phone (1g), Motorola is undoubtedly the boss, accounting for more than 70% of the market share. The semiconductor Department (later Freescale) was also very strong. For example, the CPU performance of apple computer was half a generation better than that of Intel.
After European countries partnered with Motorola to implement the GSM standard, relevant mobile phones have also been released one after another, one for each country: Nokia in Finland, Ericsson in Sweden, Siemens in Germany, Philips in the Netherlands, Alcatel in France, etc. These manufacturers not only make mobile phones, but also make their own mobile phone infrastructure (base stations, etc.), most of which can also make chips, all of which are omnipotent.
Interestingly, I don't seem to see the British mobile phone brand. Later, a British company once called acorn swept the world. After Apple gave up the Newton tablet, the real insight is ti. Ti began to introduce ARM7 in Nokia business machine 6110 and exclusively contributed 70% of its revenue to acorn, making arm turn over again in 10 years.
The situation of semiconductor manufacturers in the United States is complex. There are a lot of companies making mobile phone main chips, such as Ti, skyworks, ADI, Agere, Broadcom, Marvell, Qualcomm, etc. However, Motorola is basically the largest mobile phone manufacturer, and people have strong chips at home. Therefore, the of these companies have crossed the sea to find customers, causing chaos after chaos, and finally fell down one after another.
It is worth analyzing that so many manufacturers swarmed into GSM, on the one hand, it shows the outbreak of the mobile phone market, on the other hand, it shows that the technical threshold for making mobile phone chips in the 2G era is not high.
However, unlike today's high degree of integration of mobile phone core chips, at that time, various designs were really blooming. Today, a chip can complete the work. It was normal to use more than a dozen chips and separate devices such as MCU + DSP + Rom. each family's chip sets and development tools were different, and debugging was even more troublesome. This brings great inconvenience to the mobile phone factory, and the requirements for the technical capacity of the mobile phone factory are very high. Designing a mobile phone board is very time-consuming, so later various designs Houses have emerged one after another to directly provide design prototypes or modules for the original factory.
3、 The fate of European mobile phone chips
In 1999, Siemens semiconductor was partially dismantled and independent, which is Infineon. When I first started working in Infineon, Siemens mobile phone was standard. Another strange benefit of the company is that if you lose your mobile phone, you can buy another one for free reimbursement. Now think about it. Maybe it's not welfare. If you lose your mobile phone, don't hesitate to buy one and delay your work: -).
The quality of Siemens mobile phone is really good. I feel that it won't break if I use it as a hammer. But in that era when mobile phones had little function, appearance was more important than connotation. Slow companies like Siemens really didn't play very well. In 2005, after trying to sell to Motorola failed, the wealthy Siemens actually pasted 350 million euros to give the mobile phone department to BenQ in Taiwan. Then less than a year later, BenQ's own brand dream, the world's largest mobile phone OEM at that time, was shattered because the so-called craftsmanship spirit of Germany was too slow.
When Siemens mobile phone was not working, Infineon wireless department, a single major customer, was also tottering. In 2005, Infineon launched the industry-leading single-chip solution x-gold for $100 low-cost mobile phones, which attracted and successfully entered Chinese manufacturers such as Nokia, LG, Samsung, Konka and ZTE.
Meanwhile, jobs, who secretly developed the iPhone, is also looking for a baseband chip with high integration and simple functions. We'll save this for later.
After giving up Siemens mobile phones, I switched to Philips 9@9c In addition to being light and good-looking, this phone also has a magical feature, that is, it can stand by for a month. It's a myth today that you don't have to bring a charger.
Unfortunately, the Philips mobile phone lasted only one year longer than Siemens and was sold to CEC. The Philips chip platform played back and forth in CEC's companies for several years. Alcatel mobile phone brand was sold to TCL in 2005. Let's look at the outcome of two other mobile phone chip giants in Europe (NXP and STMicro):
In 2002, Alcatel's mobile phone chip division was merged into St
In 2006, Philips semiconductor became independent, namely NXP
In 2008, NXP wireless separated from St and established a joint venture st-nxp wireless
In 2009, st-nxp wireless and Ericsson mobile phone R & D merged to establish st Ericsson
In 2013, St Ericsson closed (equivalent to bankruptcy)
Unlike other European mobile phone manufacturers, Nokia is better at design outsourcing. At the beginning, Nokia chose Texas Instruments (TI), which has the strongest strength in the semiconductor industry and the most complete product line, as its design partner.
Ti's superb technical capabilities have brought Nokia a rich product line and stable communication signal quality. Few other manufacturers have launched so many models, but there are few models whose quality has been messed up. However, Nokia, which almost uses Ti as a single platform supplier, is no longer satisfied with its bargaining power when its mobile phone market share reaches an amazing 49%.
In 2007, Nokia started a new multi supplier strategy. STM and Infineon offered very low profit quotations in order to grab share. Ti began to hate the baseband chip business, because the generation after generation is updated too quickly, and the return on investment is much worse than that of industrial chips. In 2008, Ti announced its gradual withdrawal from baseband business, forcing Nokia to complete a comprehensive platform change by 2012. As a result, coupled with the raids of apple and Android, Nokia has also started a long way to decline its market share since 2008. Since 2011, Nokia has exclusively adopted windows with Qualcomm SOC The phone series lumia can be regarded as a complement to Microsoft's success.
4、 Mobile phone chips in the United States
In 1999, Conexant separated from Rockwell, an industrial automation company. At that time, the laptop with a Conexant telephone modem seemed to be quite standard. In 2002, skyworks separated from keshengxun and focused on wireless communication. The new skyworks soon became a good platform for Dexin wireless, and has spread its branches and leaves in many medium-sized manufacturers in China. However, the good times did not last long. MediaTek's turnkey program began to sweep China in 2004. Two years later, skyworks announced that it would give up its baseband business. Since then, skyworks has focused on RF, relying on apple, Samsung and Huawei mobile phones, TriQuint and RF Qorvo merged from micro becomes RF duo.
ADI is a very diligent company and has been working silently in China. Mobile phone chips have appeared in many second-line brands in China, but they just barely hold on. After MediaTek's great success in the Shanzhai function machine market, it urgently needs TD technology to enter the mainstream 3G market and compete with Spreadtrum, and Adi happens to have TD chip. In 2007, ADI sold the mobile phone department to MediaTek for us $350 million, which is a win-win deal. ADI is an alternative. The company has not been merged by large companies and is still living well. The reason is very simple. The founder is still chairman. This is in line with the summary in my other article "the story of BIOS and PC".
Broadcom has always occupied a leading position in the field of WiFi Bluetooth GPS, but few manufacturers use its baseband. Its baseband is often sold as a tie-in, which is a little different. However, as a communication company with a company name of COM, it is really hard to cut off the baseband market, so it has been strongly supported in the 3G era. In 2012, Broadcom acquired Renesas's LTE platform in an attempt to counter attack in the 4G field. However, the later LTE chip development was too expensive and not smooth. The progress was delayed again and again. In 2014, it was finally announced that it would not play baseband.
Marvell is the glory of a Chinese American company. Its ability to grasp the air outlet is still very strong. It is decisive to grasp the air outlet of storage and WiFi. In 2006, Marvell once again showed its vision and acquired Intel's Xscale mobile phone platform, which was equivalent to the hottest palm smartphone at that time. You know, this happened a year before the birth of the iPhone. Another thing, when TD-SCDMA was not favored by everyone, Marvell launched a chip supporting TD and hit China Mobile. Marvell The major customer of the baseband platform is blackberry, which is also very accurate. Unfortunately, Marvell's technology accumulation is not deep enough. It can't compete with Qualcomm in the United States and MediaTek in China. One year after Broadcom's exit, Marvell also abolished the baseband team.
Agere is the semiconductor of lucent. As a player of traditional voice communication, it's really good to survive into the new century. In 2006, Agere was acquired by LSI. In 2007, LSI sold Agere's mobile baseband to Infineon. It is worth mentioning that Qualcomm used CDMA to resist the antitrust law IP authorization to LSI. LSI put CDMA in 2002 IP was sold to via, viz Telecom)。 Later, the IP was worth a lot of money. Virui authorized it to MediaTek and Intel. Now everyone can do all Netcom without giving Qualcomm money.
5、 Short comment
In short, the players of mobile baseband modem are not available in Europe. Among the big players, there are Samsung in South Korea, Qualcomm in the United States, MediaTek, Hisilicon and Spreadtrum in China, and perhaps ZTE. As a rule, existing Chinese companies are not evaluated. Friends who can persist in reading until now should be familiar with Qualcomm.
With the reshuffle of international baseband platforms, design has become a hot spot in China More than 90% of house also died. For example, CLP Cylon, which cooperated with Philips, closed down due to the loss of competitiveness of Philips chips. Jiasheng Lianqiao, which cooperated with Infineon, later became a famous running company. Early transfer to MediaTek platform (MTK acquired MSTAR in 2013) and early transfer to mobile phone ODM OEM After surviving the chaos of 2g-3g, house is now doing more and more 4G: such as Wentai, Longqi and Huaqin. However, it is a pity that they are mainly used as Qualcomm platforms. The years of IDH's technology are gone, and the cost and capacity competition has become the mainstream today.
In fact, during the Warring States period, several chip companies emerged from China's TD-SCDMA, such as Tianqi, which invested and provided technology with Philips and Motorola, and Kaiming, which invested with Nokia and Ti. Acer was finally sold to st Ericsson, and Kaiming spent all his money and went bankrupt. TD's story can't be told in 100 pages. Anyway, it's a story burning hundreds of billions, and my own TD-SCDMA mobile phone has never completely opened a web page. The fruit of TD should be Spreadtrum, but it is agreed not to comment on the of Chinese companies.
6、 Apples
Finally, I came back and continued to talk about Apple and Infineon. Infineon is only a spare low-cost second and third source of goods at customers such as Nokia, Samsung and LG. In addition, the sales volume of the first three generations of iPhone is not high, so Infineon wireless Department has been losing money. To the epoch-making iPhone 4 when it was launched, although Infineon was still the main supplier of WCDMA version, Qualcomm joined as a baseband provider of CDMA2000 version. The strength of the two is a gap. Qualcomm had an absolute monopoly on the CDMA platform, and Apple had no choice at that time.
Not only was the development progress of Infineon 3G platform slow, but the signal of the first three generations of iPhone was weak. As a result, the fourth generation jobs wrapped the antenna around the mobile phone to improve the signal strength, resulting in an "antenna gate".
Although he didn't like the way Qualcomm charged (5% of the price of the mobile phone), jobs was forced to give up Infineon and switch to Qualcomm platform because Qualcomm's technology was too strong. In the next 4G LTE platform is far ahead.
In 2010, Infineon sold its unprofitable wireless division to Intel for $1.4 billion, which should be said to be an excellent outcome. Because compared with the baseband departments of Freescale, Ti, skyworks and other companies, no one bought them and closed them themselves. "I'm very happy," Jobs said when commenting on Intel's acquisition of Infineon wireless.
At that time, no one knew what he was happy about. Some technology media said that Apple should buy Infineon by itself, but by 2016, everyone began to understand.
The most important thing is that Infineon wireless can't survive without Intel's affordable father. After the acquisition, the wireless Department lost tens of billions of dollars in six or seven years. Even so, the development progress has been lagging behind and can not keep up with Qualcomm. If it hadn't been for Intel's wealth, it wouldn't have been able to stick to it. Tim Cook withstood the abuse of countless netizens and the criticism of experts, from the iPhone 7 began to reintroduce Intel LTE baseband, even though the performance is much worse than that of Qualcomm. Apple even limited the speed of Qualcomm chips to make up for the shortcomings of Intel chips.
And this year's iPhone Generation XS, Intel baseband Modem Xmm7560 officially replaced Qualcomm, like fulfilling old Joe's wish and saving a lot of money without paying Qualcomm tax.
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