SMM survey: what kind of metal do you like most in 2022?
Apple has gone further and further on the road of self-development of chips. It was reported on the 16th that Apple is opening a new office in Irvine, California, and is recruiting engineers for people with experience in the development of RF chips, RFIC (radio frequency integrated circuits) and wireless SoC. Apple will also develop Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips. Apple's chips are currently provided by Broadcom, Skyworks and Qualcomm.
Affected by this news, on the 16th, Broadcom, Skyworks, high overall fell sharply, and led the U. S. stock semiconductor plate fell across the board. According to statistics, about 1/5 of Broadcom's sales come from Apple, and nearly 60% of Skyworks's revenue comes from Apple's orders.
Apple is not only an excellent mobile phone company, it is no exaggeration to say that it is a chip design company, its core-making history has been more than a decade. From the first self-developed mobile phone chip A4 in 2010 to the first computer chip M1 chip in 2020, Apple's core-making strength is getting stronger and stronger.
At present, in addition to the core processor, Apple's homemade chip also extends to power management chip, display driver chip, GPU, fundamental frequency chip, fingerprint identification chip, 3D somatosensory chip and so on. Many of its products have already used their own chips. According to the latest news, Apple's self-developed baseband chip will be put into production in 2023, using TSMC's 4nm process technology.
Why do you want to study on your own?
On the one hand, in order to improve the new energy of the chip and develop more high-end products, Apple's MacBook Pro with self-developed M1 Pro and M1 Max chip has been officially released. M1 Pro chip uses 5nm technology, which is twice as fast as M1 chip. M1 Max, which is called "the strongest in history", is far better than M1 Pro. According to The Information's previous report, Apple has completed the physical design of three AR/VR chips, all of which have entered the streaming stage and are about to usher in trial production.
On the other hand, it is to improve its own supply chain ecology. Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush, an investment bank, said Apple's purpose of developing its own wireless chip is to no longer rely on chip designers. Earlier, it was reported that Apple would follow the contract manufacturing model of TSMC for its A-series processors and M-series processors and hand over all its self-designed RF IC to a contract factory for production. Apple would directly bind the production capacity of the contract factory and no longer place orders through the chip design factory.
At a time when mobile phone dividends are dissipating, Apple's chip development strategy has added a touch of light to it, helping its market capitalization soar to nearly $3 trillion, and the chip division is now considered one of Apple's most valuable assets.
