Samsung opens up 5G chips, giving OPPO and vivo another choice

According to foreign media reports, several Chinese manufacturers including OPPO and vivo have received multiple samples of their 5G chipset solutions from Samsung. These OEMs are now intensively testing Samsung's 5G chipset solutions.

Currently, the only commercially available 5G mobile phone baseband chips are Qualcomm's Snapdragon X50, Huawei's Balong 5000, and Samsung's Exynos Modem 5100. Since none of these three companies have launched SoC mobile phone chips with integrated 5G basebands, at least before the first quarter of next year, commercial 5G mobile phones will basically use external 5G baseband solutions.

Therefore, for mobile phone brand manufacturers, it is natural to choose different 5G baseband chips to match. However, since Huawei's 5G baseband chip is not currently available to the public, and Samsung is ready to supply its 5G baseband to the public. Therefore, other mobile phone brand manufacturers can choose Qualcomm's 5G baseband as an alternative, and can also use Samsung's 5G baseband as an alternative. In addition, MediaTek's 5G baseband Helio M70 is also about to be mass-produced.

According to a recent report by Taiwanese media Digitimes, Samsung Electronics has provided 5G chipset solution samples to some Chinese mobile phone manufacturers including OPPO and vivo for testing and verification. It may become one of the alternative solutions for OPPO and vivo.

Supply chain sources pointed out that although OPPO and other manufacturers have decided to adopt MediaTek's 5G chip Helio M70, which will be officially mass-produced in the first half of 2020, and have also purchased chips from Qualcomm, in order to balance the purchase ratio from Qualcomm, many domestic manufacturers are actively testing and verifying Samsung's Exynos series 5G mobile phone chips that are self-developed and partially sold externally.

In the first half of this year, Samsung has announced the mass production of several 5G mobile phone chips, including the modem chip Exynos Modem 5100, the wireless radio frequency (RF) chip Exynos RF 5500, and the power management chip Exynos SM 5800. All three chips support the sub-6 GHz frequency band of 5G NR.

In terms of specific specifications, the Exynos Modem 5100 chip is built with a 10nm LPP process, supports Sub 6GHz low-mid frequency (to be adopted in my country) and mmWave high frequency, and is backward compatible with 2G/3G/4G networks. However, it should be pointed out that the Exynos Modem 5100 currently only supports NSA networking, not SA.