After transferring half of the LTE modems order to Intel, the tech giant Apple Inc. is now seeking additional modem capacity support from a Taiwan based fabless semiconductor company claimed by renowned news journal WSJ back in October.
Due to the fact that the company was being allegedly involved in a patent lawsuit in January 2017 against the prominent smartphone chip making company Qualcomm for unfair patent royalty calculation formula involving LTE modems deployed in their devices.
Because of this, they took efforts to withdraw their existing orders from Qualcomm as a move towards self-protection. However, this is not the very first attempt made by Apple to join MediaTek and Intel.
According to the previous reports, if Apple ditches Qualcomm then their upcoming iPhone devices will face a huge problem delivering sufficient uplink & downlink speeds.
Furthermore, there wasn’t any statement on this over hyped speculation about MediaTek. According to some industry watchers the Taiwanese chip manufacturing company is predominantly seeking for potential customers regarding their orders.
MediaTek, however, meets the principal requirements i.e. leading technological competitiveness, comprehensive product blueprints, and reliable logistic support that are followed by Apple for determining chip providers for its several product lineups.
Moreover, sources also claims that it’d be a better opportunity for MediaTek to be a partner with tech giant Apple for fulfilling the manufacturing requirements of products like smart speakers, wireless charging devices, and wireless connection systems.
Apart from taking over the LTE chip supply orders, the pricing strategy of MediaTek for both SoC as well as connectivity modems give them an extra edge to be potentially considered as next LTE modem manufacturer of Apple. Though, arguably they will not achieve a long-term advantages from their own SoCs.
