Custom iPhone baseband chips seen as too 'herculean' a task for Apple to tackle in-house
With recent rumors and hires suggesting Apple may be planning to build its own custom baseband chips for future iPhones, moving away from off-the-shelf silicon from companies like Qualcomm, one analyst thinks it's a highly unlikely route for Apple to take given the time it would have to invest.
Analyst Brian Modoff with Deutsche Bank issued a note to investors on Monday in which he said the issue in developing a multimode baseband from scratch is not dollars, but rather the the time necessary. He estimates it would take at least five years for top-tier talent and about 1,000 total engineers to develop a custom baseband, and he doesn't see Apple taking on that "herculean task."
"Instead of an organic baseband development, we believe Apple is rather trying to realize better integration with existing baseband chipsets and their apps processor, or possibly developing their own internal Wi-Fi chipset," Modoff said.
The comments are similar to ones made last week by Rod Hall of JP Morgan, who cited the "notoriously difficult" nature of developing baseband processors. Hall said he didn't believe Apple would be able to utilize custom iPhone baseband chips until 2015 at the earliest --?a timeframe much sooner than Modoff believes is possible.
AppleInsider discovered earlier this month that Apple has hired away senior radio frequency engineers from Broadcom and Qualcomm. The news came after a rumor claimed Apple was planning to move its baseband processor design in-house.
In addition to hiring at least 30 mid- and senior-level baseband software and hardware engineers from existing players like Broadcom and Qualcomm over the last three years, Apple is also advertising more than 50 additional openings related to RF chip design. Still, those numbers are well short of the 1,000-plus engineers that Modoff believes would be necessary to accelerate baseband chip development.
The baseband chip acts as the "brain" of a handset's wireless modem. Working in concert with a transceiver, which controls the sending and receiving of wireless signals through the antenna, the baseband processor is what allows a device to communicate over cellular networks.
Over the last few years, Apple has been selectively bringing certain aspects of product development in-house, making the company less reliant on off-the-shelf parts that competitors can also utilize. Developing its own chips, such as the A-series processors found in the iPhone and iPad, also allows Apple the ability to better keep secrets within the company, without having to share information with third parties.
Analyst Brian Modoff with Deutsche Bank issued a note to investors on Monday in which he said the issue in developing a multimode baseband from scratch is not dollars, but rather the the time necessary. He estimates it would take at least five years for top-tier talent and about 1,000 total engineers to develop a custom baseband, and he doesn't see Apple taking on that "herculean task."
Brian Modoff with Deutsche Bank believes Apple may instead be looking to better integrate existing baseband chipsets with its own custom A-series chips.
"Instead of an organic baseband development, we believe Apple is rather trying to realize better integration with existing baseband chipsets and their apps processor, or possibly developing their own internal Wi-Fi chipset," Modoff said.
The comments are similar to ones made last week by Rod Hall of JP Morgan, who cited the "notoriously difficult" nature of developing baseband processors. Hall said he didn't believe Apple would be able to utilize custom iPhone baseband chips until 2015 at the earliest --?a timeframe much sooner than Modoff believes is possible.
AppleInsider discovered earlier this month that Apple has hired away senior radio frequency engineers from Broadcom and Qualcomm. The news came after a rumor claimed Apple was planning to move its baseband processor design in-house.
In addition to hiring at least 30 mid- and senior-level baseband software and hardware engineers from existing players like Broadcom and Qualcomm over the last three years, Apple is also advertising more than 50 additional openings related to RF chip design. Still, those numbers are well short of the 1,000-plus engineers that Modoff believes would be necessary to accelerate baseband chip development.
The baseband chip acts as the "brain" of a handset's wireless modem. Working in concert with a transceiver, which controls the sending and receiving of wireless signals through the antenna, the baseband processor is what allows a device to communicate over cellular networks.
Over the last few years, Apple has been selectively bringing certain aspects of product development in-house, making the company less reliant on off-the-shelf parts that competitors can also utilize. Developing its own chips, such as the A-series processors found in the iPhone and iPad, also allows Apple the ability to better keep secrets within the company, without having to share information with third parties.
Comments
Would it more difficult to develop a CPU? Stoopid analysts.
Its not about CPU or tech.
Its about patents. Talent migration. Need-to-innovate-our-own-thing.
Or license.
The only thing I am confident about is that analysts have no idea what Apple is doing.
Would it more difficult to develop a CPU? Stoopid analysts.
Whether it's more difficult than a CPU doesn't matter - Apple already have the talent for a CPU, but they don't have a lot of people on the baseband side of things, and they might not have the patents or licensing needed either. But as it turns out, a baseband chip probably would be more difficult than a CPU. The baseband chip often has its own memory and firmware, and the firmware has to respond to hardware / network events much quicker than a normal OS. If you've got the people it's possible, but it'll still take a long time and it's a specialist area.
The analysts are arguing that Apple would need both a lot of time and a bigger team to design their own baseband chip - this seems fair enough to me. The alternatives they've suggested also seem pretty sensible - both would reduce Apple's reliance on third parties, and will give them a good foothold should they want to manufacture the entire baseband chip.
What is the status on the Qualcomm RF360? If that chip is finalized for the iPhone 6 it would be very beneficial to Apple. One chip that can handle pretty much all bands on GSM, CDMA, and LTE. It would work on pretty much every carrier in the world. I wonder how far they are from production.
http://www.qualcomm.com/chipsets/gobi/rf-solutions/qualcomm-rf360-front-end
Why have been seeing so many posts recently that just write undefined as the message?
If you happen to use Facebook for forum log in on other sites for some reason it will log you off of your account here and log you in with your Facebook account if you ever created one. The post are then posted as "undefined" Not sure if it is a glitch with safari, Facebook, or AI. But for some reason it always logs me off this account and tries to sign me in on Facebook if I visit a site where I actually use FB to log in for comments and come back.
So Apple will have some of the best minds working on baseband chips with a pretty much unlimited budget and they will fail how?
Who said anything about an unlimited budget?
In one of his presentations of the pCell technology, Steve Perlman said they had installed the pCell chips into (on the back of??) iPhones in addition to the standard LTE chips. That way when a user entered into a metropolis supported by pCells, they would get the advantages of pCell. Conversely, when they left the pCell area, the cell communication would be handed off to the regular [non-pCell] cell network.
these "...guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in."
"Apple could never build a mobile 64-bit chip on their own." - some idiot analyst last year
And piling on...
Remember all the analysts predicting the M7 chip? Yeah, they're clued into what Apple is or isn't doing.
Yeah
Did a little more research on the Qualcomm RF360 and it appears to be ready for mass production now. I will be very surprised if this is not what Apple uses for the iPhone 6. This would be the holy grail.
From Qualcomm.
The WTR1625L, a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., is the first in the industry to support carrier aggregation with a significant expansion in the number of active RF bands. The WTR1625L can accommodate all cellular modes and 2G, 3G and 4G/LTE frequency bands and band combinations that are either deployed or in commercial planning globally. Additionally, it has an integrated, high-performance GPS core that also supports GLONASS and Beidou systems. The WTR1625L is tightly integrated in a wafer scale package and optimized for efficiency, offering 20 percent power savings compared to previous generations. The new transceiver, along with the Qualcomm RF360 Front End chips, is integral to Qualcomm’s single-SKU World Mode LTE solution for mobile devices.
http://gigaom.com/2014/02/06/the-first-smartphone-powered-end-to-end-by-qualcomm-will-debut-this-year/
The eventual advantage Apple could leverage here is a software system that controls what the baseband is doing based upon the task the phone is being used for. It is also possible to add bandwidth from a next generation wireless point to the phone functions to avoid call dropping and other annoyances on calls made from one iPhone to another (like iMessage). This would directly attack the wireless providers source of revenue and ability to upcharge their customers. Even having the ability to do this in house would be a deal changer as far as negotiations with Cellular companies goes.