Apple filed a counterclaim against Qualcomm on Wednesday saying the latter's Snapdragon smartphone chip infringed on Apple's patents, while Qualcomm appealed Apple for infringing five patents involving the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X.
This is the latest in a series of lawsuits and accusations by two industry giants, with industry veterans who have been in constant contact with the two companies, saying the company is in full infighting with Qualcomm in an effort to make its own baseband chips and integrate it with its own CPU Together
Earlier, media reports, Apple will purchase Intel and MediaTek baseband chip, but this is not the ultimate goal of Apple, and the cooperation of these two companies is only Apple's self-study baseband chip transition.
There are two major parts of the mobile phone circuit: part of the high-level processing part of the equivalent of the computer; the other part is the baseband, responsible for the completion of the mobile network wireless signal demodulation, descrambling, despreading and decoding work, and finally decode the completed number The signal is passed to the upper processing system for processing.
A chip in-house computing, an external interconnection.In recent years, the trend is the two chips together, Qualcomm do so, Huawei and Samsung do the same, the result is faster computing, more energy saving. These two aspects are very important to mobile phone users.
However, because Apple's CPU chip is its own, and the baseband is the acquisition of Qualcomm and Intel, so there is no way to put the two together, if together, you can make the advantages of Apple's mobile phone more obvious.
Apple is accustomed to controlling the production of key components such as A-series chips used in Apple's mobile phones, abandoning the graphics chip (GPU) provided by Imagination and using its own developed GPUs, and Apple is moving away from relying on key suppliers.
In turn, Qualcomm dominated cell-phone chips and patents and worked well with Apple before, but with constraints in January. In January, Apple demanded that California courts russate Qualcomm to refund $ 1 billion in license fees and cut down on future Patent Licensing Standards This is the beginning of a public crackdown between the two companies.
In April of this year, Apple announced that it would stop paying royalties to Qualcomm Inc. In September, Qualcomm applied for a ban on iPhone products in China, with news of mutual courtesies every few months.
Qualcomm mainly sued Apple for infringing its patent rights and Apple sued Qualcomm for charges that were too high, as Apple recently sued Qualcomm for infringing its patents on a relatively rare basis.
For Qualcomm, there's no escape from the fight against Apple, the world's most profitable handset maker, capable of paying royalties, and Apple has little patent in the communications space to bypass Qualcomm, and both In the United States, the United States is very protective of patent rights.
Baseband chip is not expensive, but the collection of a lot of patented technology.Because the communication carriers of different countries have different communication standards, baseband chips to meet the needs of various operators, Qualcomm has a unique advantage in this regard. Qualcomm has a variety of communications industry around Open the standard patent, the patent has 130,000, of which chip-related patents accounted for only 10% of them.
Qualcomm spent a total of $ 46.8 billion in research and development in fiscal 2002-2017. Last year, Qualcomm invested a total of $ 5.1 billion in research and development, accounting for one-fifth of its revenue, close to two-thirds of the revenue from its patent-granted business ($ 7.5 billion).
Qualified patents continue to support Qualcomm's research and development, and Qualcomm is one of the few companies that rely mainly on patents to survive, which allows Chinese handset manufacturers to use off-the-shelf technology without the need for protracted research and development, which is where many people find Qualcomm worth supporting However, how much patent fees should be collected, and there is no uniform standard, the companies that are being charged always feel overcharged.
Even if Apple can do baseband chip, it can not bypass Qualcomm royalties, still have to pay a huge patent to Qualcomm.Quotes may at any time by increasing royalties will compensate for the loss back.This is estimated to Apple's headaches.