Apple's Internal Hardware Team Is Working On Modems That Will Likely Replace Intel (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple will design its own modems in-house, according to sources that spoke with Reuters. In doing so, the company may hope to leave behind Intel modems in its mobile devices, which Apple has used since a recent falling out with Qualcomm. According to the sources, the team working on modem design now reports to Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies. Srouji joined Apple back in 2004 and led development of Apple's first in-house system-on-a-chip, the A4. He has overseen Apple silicon ever since, including the recent A12 and A12X in the new iPhone and iPad Pro models.

Before this move, Apple's modem work ultimately fell under Dan Riccio, who ran engineering for iPhones, iPads, and Macs. As Reuters noted, that division was heavily focused on managing the supply chain and working with externally made components. The fact that the team is moving into the group focused on developing in-house components is a strong signal that Apple will not be looking outside its own walls for modems in the future. In recent years, Apple has been locked in a costly and complex series of legal battles with Qualcomm, the industry's foremost maker of mobile wireless chips. While Apple previously used Qualcomm's chips in its phones, the legal struggles led the tech giant to turn instead to Intel in recent iPhones.

Comments

Inevitable, yet interesting

[Anubis IV]

After they moved chip production in-house with their A-series, which has routinely been benchmarking far ahead of contemporary chips from Qualcomm, people started wondering when they'd do the same with cellular modems. Their recent spat with Qualcomm and their reliance on a lesser product from Intel may have hastened their decision to take it on themselves.

It'll be interesting to see if, when, and how it pans out. With their processors and GPUs, they were able to build on top of ARM and Imagination tech, respectively (though they're now doing their own thing with the latter), but what do they build on with modems? And how will they avoid Qualcomm's prodigious patent portfolio covering the technology?

Re:Inevitable, yet interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

All they are licensing is the iSA. That's a definition of what the opcodes are and what the opcode is supposed to do, it is just text. Apple's engineers laid out the entire CPU, deciding where every transistor and wire goes, they didn't get any of that from ARM. Neither did Samsung for their latest Exynos, it also had fully custom cores. Qualcomm, on the other hand, licenses an ARM core like the A76 and makes a few modifications, and Huawei just licenses the straight core and doesn't make any changes of their own.

This is not the same as Apple and its A-series SoC

[NimbleSquirrel]

This is not the same as Apple and its A-series SoCs. Apple purchased licenses from ARM Holdings to produce their own ARM-based CPUs. There is no one single company Apple can go to to license the technology to produce its own baseband chipsets. Additionally, Apple is in a very public battle with Qualcomm about the very patents and licenses that underpin 3G/4G/5G baseband technology.

The patent licensing aside, one of the other Qualcomm lawsuits involves the violation of NDAs and Apple violating Qualcomm's baseband technology trade secrets. In order to integrate Qualcomm's chipsets into the iPhone, Apple entered into NDAs with Qualcomm for detailed technical information. Qualcomm alleges that Apple shared these secrets with Intel after Apple dumped Qualcomm chipsets. Even if Qualcomm cannot prove that Apple did this, it is going to be impossible for Apple to prove that they somehow did not use this same information to produce their own baseband chipsets. I believe this is a much bigger issue for Apple than the patent licensing issue. Undoubtedly there will be direct non-compete clauses in these NDAs.

Short of actually purchasing Qualcomm, or some other baseband chipset manufacturer, it will be impossible for Apple to show that they have come up with their own cleanroom implementation of baseband chipsets that is unencumbered by some kind of patent or licensing issue or NDA contractual issue.