“Chip vendors including Qualcomm, Broadcom, STMicroelectronics, NXP, Texas Instruments and OmniVision reportedly have started stocking their solutions used for Apple’s next-generation iPhone slated to hit the market in the second half of 2012, according to industry sources,” Cage Chao and Steve Shen report for DigiTimes.
“Qualcomm and Broadcom are producing 4G and Wi-Fi chips using a 28nm process at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), indicated the sources, adding that OmniVision is currently also seeking capacity at TSMC’s 12-inch fab, resulting a tight production capacity for the foundry’s 28nm process,” Chao and Shen report. “Qualcomm alone needs about 10,000 28nm 12-inch wafers, or one-third of 28nm capacity at TSMC, for the production of 4G chips for iPhones, not mention the additional supply of 4G chips to other clients, revealed the sources.”
Read more in the full article here.
With the implementation of LTE by the Telcos and now the smartphone makers, will the LTE Telcos be as fragmented as the current state of affairs we enjoy in the USA? Ie. Sprint buys Nextel but two different systems hard to merge. Apple intros iPhone to ATT. Sorry Verizon you are CDMA. T-Mobile? Hell you are in your own whacky universe even though like ATT you are GSM. Will this crap be gone forever and Apple only needs to create one iPhone for the US market or are we stuck with fragmentation for the foreseeable future?
You only have to look at the fiasco in Australia to see this happening, where they sued Apple because their ‘4G’ standard doesn’t match what others are using. We don’t even have the beginning of a 4G infrastructure here in the UK, because the frequencies have not been offered for sale yet.
I can see a similar clusterfuck here, unless the telcos take notice of what the iPhone operates on. And as they all sell it, they ought to know…
It’s not just dependant on the systems used (Australia uses the same system), But also the frequencies allocated to the carriers. Not all countries have the same unused frequencies available. This is something that the phone manufactures should be well aware of.