Apple is having trouble producing this kind of chip again

When the iPhone 15 series was released, Apple released its first commercially available 3nm chip. Just a few days before its release, Qualcomm announced that it had reached an agreement with Apple to provide Snapdragon for smartphones launched by Apple from 2024 to 2026. 5G modem (baseband) and radio frequency system. This means that Apple’s self-developed baseband chips are blocked.

On November 17, foreign media also claimed that Apple once again encountered problems with its self-developed 5G baseband and had to continue to delay its use plan. The launch time will not be until the end of 2025 or early 2026 at the earliest. And this is not the worst case scenario. Apple’s self-developed 5G baseband chips are still in the early stages and are already several years behind. By the time Apple’s research and development is completed, all its friends will start 6G.

So, why does Apple have advanced chips but repeatedly fails in baseband chips?

Fu Bin丨Author

Produced by Electronic Engineering World (ID: EEworldbbs)丨

What is Apple doing?

Why does Apple put so much effort into doing this? Apple is not trying to make the signal better, the answer is simple, it is to make more money.

On the one hand, there are a large number of patents for baseband chips. It is difficult for latecomers to develop baseband chips to bypass many of these patents. It is a good business to just collect the patents.

On the other hand, it is still too expensive to buy Qualcomm. After all, its products contain the "Qualcomm tax", which is the power of the monopolist.

Taking the iPhone 12 using Qualcomm baseband as an example, the price of the baseband has reached US$58.5, even exceeding the price of the processor. If you are afraid that Apple will successfully develop baseband chips, given Apple's shipment volume, it won't take long to recover the cost. 

A brief review of Apple's baseband chip history is a history of torment. 

At first, Apple mainly used Infineon's baseband chips. Later, Infineon's wireless solutions business was acquired by Intel. In 2011, Apple's first model using Qualcomm's baseband chip was the 2011 iPhone 4S. Since then, Apple has become associated with Qualcomm, but from then on, due to the high price, perhaps there was a rift.

In 2013, Qualcomm reached an exclusive agreement with Apple, paying Apple $1 billion to obtain the "exclusive rights" for iPhone baseband chips after 2013. Through the agreement, Apple can not only reduce costs, obtain higher profits, but also ensure better communication performance. But what Apple didn't expect was that after iPhone sales soared, licensing fees had already exceeded US$1 billion.

In 2016, Apple began to use cheaper Intel basebands in the iPhone 7. At first, it was mixed with Qualcomm in a small amount, and then the mixing ratio became higher and higher. This move made the relationship between Apple and Qualcomm become delicate. At that time, the biggest problem with Intel baseband was that it did not support CDMA, so Apple still made a distinction. Some countries only used Qualcomm baseband instead of randomly mixing them.

At the beginning, everyone had no idea about mixed use. Until 2018, the signal performance of iPhone XS and Xs Max was getting worse and worse, and many people blamed Intel baseband. The disassembly found that both new iPhones did not use Qualcomm baseband, but chose Intel PMB9955 baseband (real model Intel XMM7560), which is the fifth-generation LTE modem that supports CDMA, although there is no evidence that the Intel baseband signal is not good. , but it also makes people pay more attention to the baseband chip, after all, it is linked to the basic signal.

In 2017, Apple officially sounded the clarion call for counterattack, suing Qualcomm for abusing its monopoly position in the field of communication baseband chips and charging excessive patent licensing fees. Subsequently, conflicts between the two parties began to intensify and relations deteriorated sharply. In the process, Apple reduced its use of Qualcomm baseband chips and switched to Intel's baseband chips. At the same time, Apple is also actively developing its own baseband chips.

On April 16, 2019, Apple and Qualcomm finally reached a "two-way trip" out of necessity. Apple and Qualcomm reached a settlement and dropped all lawsuits. At the same time, Apple also paid a fee (at least US$4.5 billion) to Qualcomm. On the same day, Intel also announced that it would abandon the research and development of mobile phone baseband chips. 

In July 2019, Apple acquired "most" of Intel's mobile phone baseband chip business for US$1 billion, thus foretelling the road to self-developed basebands.

In February 2020, a U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) document showed that Apple will need to purchase Qualcomm's 5G baseband until at least 2024: using the Snapdragon X55 baseband from June 1, 2020 to May 31, 2021 , use Snapdragon X60 from June 1, 2021 to May 31, 2022; use Snapdragon X65 or Snapdragon X70 from June 1, 2022 to May 31, 2024.

In November 2021, Qualcomm revealed that its business of supplying baseband chips to Apple will shrink in the next two years. In 2023, only 20% of iPhones will use Qualcomm baseband.

In June 2022, Guo Mingqi said that Apple's self-developed 5G baseband chip was not successful, which also made Qualcomm still the exclusive supplier of 5G baseband chips for the new iPhone in the second half of 2023.

In March 2023, the media stated that Apple’s independently developed 5G baseband chip, codenamed Ibiza, will use TSMC’s 3nm process technology. At the same time, related radio frequency ICs will also use TSMC’s 7nm process. It is also expected to be used for the first time in the iPhone 16 launched by Apple in 2024. series of mobile phones.

Now it seems that it is a foregone conclusion that the iPhone 16 series will not be able to use self-developed baseband chips, and, according to recent foreign media reports, it may even be delayed until early 2026. But it is foreseeable that Apple is not giving up. After all, the success of the A series and M series chips has given Apple enough sweetness to make more money. Who wouldn't want to?

So, why is it so difficult for even Apple to produce baseband chips? What exactly is the difficulty? First, let’s briefly understand the location and structure of the baseband chip in the communication module.

Mobile phone wireless communication modules are mainly divided into four parts: radio frequency front-end, baseband, transceiver, and antenna. Each part is composed of a large number of discrete chips and is very complex.

The full name of baseband is basic frequency band. It originally refers to the inherent frequency broadband of unmodulated original electrical signals, that is, the 0Hz signal at the center point. Now it usually refers to the communication module in mobile phones, including baseband chips, baseband signal modems and Other auxiliary components.

It can be said that the baseband chip is the core part of the baseband. It is the steward of wireless communications and is responsible for signal generation, modulation, coding, frequency shifting, etc. Although baseband chips do not have high process requirements in comparison and are not affected by Moore's Law, their designs are complex and generally use operating frequency band and gain as the main measurement criteria. Therefore, the overall market is relatively stable and updates are slow.

In fact, a baseband chip can be understood as a small computer, including five parts: CPU processor, channel encoder, digital signal processor, modem and interface module. Separate systems help operate more efficiently and protect against application errors or operating system changes. 

The baseband chip hardware architecture mostly adopts the Arm processor + DSP + ASIC architecture, involving encoding and decoding, channel estimation, channel equalization, synchronization and measurement algorithms, etc.; the software involves real-time operating system (RTOS), drivers (Drivers) and protocol stack ( Protocol Stack), determines the upper limit of baseband chip performance. 

For baseband chips, the main difficulties include the following: 

First, the baseband chip needs to be compatible with multiple frequency bands, and the mobile phone communication frequency bands in various countries and regions are different, making its design difficult. Think about it, if you can't even make calls in another region or country, that's completely out of touch with the essence of a mobile phone. 

Second, there are many modes that baseband chips need to be compatible with. For example, 5G baseband chips must also be compatible with 2G/3G/4G. In addition, there are many domestic operators, and different operators also have different models, such as China Telecom, China Telecom and China Telecom. China Unicom and China Mobile’s TD-LTE, FDD-LTE, TD-SCDMA, CDMA (EVDO, 2000), WCDMA, GSM, etc. In addition, the communication industry includes device compatibility of different communication devices. Including Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, and ZTE, you don’t know what equipment the operator uses when setting up the network, so the safest way is to support all devices with compatibility.

Third, 5G baseband chip design requirements are higher, and research and development requires strong technical reserves and continuous financial support. Millimeter waves are high-frequency waves with large bandwidth and fast transmission speed. However, the wavelength is very short and the signal is easily interfered. Therefore, the design of the radio frequency (RF) antenna module must be improved to achieve better performance. In addition, 5G must also meet the needs of three typical scenarios: eMBB, mMTCL, and uRLLC, because the target market of 5G is not limited to mobile phones, but also covers applications such as the Internet of Things, industrial automation, and smart cities.

Fourth, many key patents have been monopolized by oligopolies for a long time. According to the Strategy Analytics report, Qualcomm's mobile phone baseband chip revenue accounted for 62% of total global revenue in 2022Q3, followed by MediaTek (26%) and Samsung (6%). It has been previously reported that the reason why Apple has been facing difficulties in research and development is because Qualcomm owns two key patents. If it wants to continue to develop 5G baseband chips, it must pay Qualcomm high patent fees.