Recently, the mobile phone industry can be said to be quite lively, on the one hand, Qualcomm and MediaTek have launched a new generation of flagship mobile platforms, a large number of new flagship models have either been released, or are on the way to release.
On the other hand, "self-developed chips" will undoubtedly become a hot topic chased by several major head brands in 2021. From the self-developed ISP surging C1 announced by Xiaomi at the beginning of the year, to the self-developed ISP Yueying V1 of vivo in the middle of the year, and then to the self-developed image dedicated NPU Mariana X released by OPPO and Xiaomi's self-developed 120W charging chip surging P1, in just one year, we have ushered in the debut of three brands and four self-developed mobile phone chips.
To be fair, although these "mobile phone chips" do not belong to the SoC or AP (application processor, that is, SoC to remove the baseband part) scheme that everyone knows, it is undeniable that these brands have launched self-developed chips, which objectively do bring a unique functional experience to the corresponding models. At the same time, in their research and development, no one can say whether they have accumulated experience in advanced processes and complex large chip designs.
However, what we want to discuss today is not when mobile phone manufacturers can build their own SoCs, but we will continue to focus on such "functional small chips". Combined with the current hardware architecture and market demand of the smart phone itself, to discuss with you such a question, that is, for mobile phone manufacturers, before finally manufacturing a "big chip" such as a self-developed SoC, what other components can be "practiced" through self-development?
First of all, you must know that the "internal structure" of the mobile phone is actually not complicated
Although we always say that mobile phones are high-tech products. But because of this, under the current semiconductor technology system, the motherboard area of mobile phones is actually getting smaller and smaller, and the internal chip integration is also getting higher and higher.
What does this mean? Here to take TechInsights's disassembly results of Google Pixel 6 Pro as an example, in the huge body is actually installed with a chip motherboard, just a very small area of the frame. On this framework, in addition to tiny capacitors, resistors, and various data line interfaces, the total number of chips that really play a functional role is only 31.
Further exploration of the models and uses of these chips, it can basically be divided into 8 categories, namely:
Application processor: 1 (Tensor chip customized by Google to Samsung)
Memory and Flash: 2 (Flash and Memory produced by Samsung)
Power management chips: 11 (from Samsung, NXP, Maxim, including wired charging management, wireless charging management, power protection, power supply management several subdivisions)
Baseband and RF chips: 9 (from Samsung and Skyworks)
Connection-related chips: 3 (from STmicroelectronics and Broadcom for NFC, Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS functions)
Audio chips: 3 (from Cirrus Logic, including speaker amplifier and audio decoding)
Screen touch chip: 1 pcs
Secure encryption chip: 1 (Google's own Titan M)
Did you find it? In fact, the number of internal chips in today's smartphones is not as much as many friends think, and there is not much room for terminal manufacturers to "play on their own".
"Self-developed chips" should consider both practicality and feasibility
Why do we say that? First of all, we must know that after so many years of development of the mobile phone industry, many fields have actually formed very high technical and patent barriers. In these areas, mobile phone manufacturers are not only extremely difficult to achieve "self-research" in technology, but even if they really create chips, they are likely to face patent problems, or they have almost no practical value.
For example, it is typical that the baseband and radio frequency of the mobile phone, as well as the connection function related chips such as Bluetooth and WiFi. On the one hand, the whole industry has only one hand can count the manufacturers, grasping a variety of baseband, wireless standards related to the core patents; on the other hand, we must not forget that the wireless connection ability of the mobile phone is to cooperate with the operator's base station, with the WiFi router at home to play a role, even if there are mobile phone manufacturers independently developed wireless chips, it is likely to be used with other brands of base station solutions, router solutions when the situation of "water and soil", so it is difficult to play performance.
The audio ICs of AKM, ESS, Cirrus Logic and other major manufacturers have already performed extremely well, and there is no need for additional improvements
Secondly, there is another type of chip, although the technical barriers are not particularly high, but the related technology has been extremely mature, there is almost no need for self-development and improvement, such as audio chips, touch chips belong to this category. For today's smartphones, whether they use audio solutions or touch technology, they have not reached the "potential limit" of the relevant chip suppliers. For mobile phone manufacturers, the results of self-developed such chips are likely to have a better user experience than the public version of the solution that the supplier can easily make, so it is almost unnecessary.
Because of this, we see that the self-developed chips announced by several mobile phone manufacturers throughout 2021 are almost all concentrated on ISPs, NPUs, and power management chips (PMUs) used to enhance the camera processing power of mobile phones, as well as power management chips (PMUs) to speed up mobile phone charging speed and improve battery capacity. Obviously, the reason why mobile phone manufacturers choose to develop their own chips in these areas is because consumers do have a strong demand for mobile phone photography and fast charging, and self-developed chips can significantly improve the experience; the second is because the technical barriers in these areas themselves are relatively low, and the products provided by suppliers may indeed not be enough, so "self-research" is both necessary and particularly effective.
Display assistance and security chips may be the next "self-developed" target
Understanding this truth, we look back at the configuration and functions of the major flagship models on the market today, and it is not difficult to sort out the more likely direction of "self-developed chips".
First of all, the independent display enhancement chip is what we think of Sanyi Life as a "manufacturer's self-developed solution" that may appear in the future smartphone. The reason for this is that on the one hand, from the perspective of its own functionality, independent display auxiliary chips can mainly solve three problems. One is to assist in correcting the screen color, while making the automatic brightness adjustment more natural and soft, enhance the screen perception; the second is that the video being played by the mobile phone can be improved resolution, interpolated, color enhancement, etc., and the power consumption is much lower than the use of CPU; finally, the independent display assistance chip in the game scene can also double the actual load of the GPU in disguise through the way of interpolation, thus playing a role in energy saving cooling and extending the endurance.
On the other hand, "independent display enhancement chips" are not new in the mobile phone industry today. Especially in recent years, consumers have become more and more concerned about display quality, game fluency and endurance, independent display enhancement chips have begun to be equipped with more and more models, and have achieved a good reputation among users.
Most importantly, because the relevant suppliers do not pay attention to the promotion of the terminal market, although the "independent display enhancement chip" exists in the market demand, consumers have almost no "brand belief" in it. In this case, mobile phone manufacturers can not only create more differentiated functions, but also easy to be accepted by the market.
In addition to display enhancement chips, independent security encryption chips are also one of the projects that may be put on the self-research agenda of mobile phone manufacturers in the next stage. In fact, throughout the history of the development of smart phones, there have been some examples of models equipped with independent encryption chips in the past, compared with other models, such "secure mobile phones" can generally achieve a higher level of privacy protection, and even used as some specific financial scenarios.
Google's Pixel phones have been equipped with a self-developed standalone Titan M security chip for several generations
Not to mention, consumers are paying more and more attention to "privacy" and "security" today, and digital currencies are becoming increasingly popular today. In this context, the development of independent security chips with domestic independent standards by mobile phone manufacturers can not only earn word of mouth, but also may bring some practical functional advantages that are difficult to be surpassed in a short period of time, or help open up the enterprise market.
Of course, having said all this, we finally hope that after "practicing" with small chips again and again, we can finally usher in the situation of more terminal manufacturers developing SoCs. After all, this is not just a "face problem", but it is more likely to bring practical benefits to consumers. However, the chip has always been urgent, for us, we can only have an inclusive mentality, patiently waiting for further good news from relevant manufacturers.
【The picture of this article comes from the network】