sfx2000

Always interesting to see the community response to news like this...

It's not the chip, it's the IP...

Qualcomm will get paid whether it's a Qualcomm chip or Apple, and they will likely pay more to Qualcomm since they will not get rebates on the modem chipsets.

Hey, getting there is half the battle as I've been in the business for 30 years now - folks over in Santa Clara and Munich have been working hard - firmware and the protocol stack, that's been done for some time...

The delay, based on folks I know, was getting the baseband on to the A-Series chip itself, much like the efforts they're doing with BT and WiFi.

Intel was spending over a billion USD annually for the Apple modem contracts - and this was R&D - not just for development, but the larger expense with QA and certification and regulatory - it has to do everything in the spec, not just for 5G, but for LTE, UMTS, and GSM in a multi-mode environment.

When you do a Qualcomm based design, that's all included for the protocol stack - so it's just down to the RF testing...

Little know fact - the Intel Modems that supported CDMA (Sprint/Verizon) used licensed IP from Via directly - including their SW stack.