Samsung cracks Qualcomm’s stronghold. Mounting its own AP & LTE single chip on its Galaxy Win

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Samsung cracks Qualcomm’s stronghold. Mounting its own AP & LTE single chip on its Galaxy Win

디지털데일리 발행일 2013-11-20 15:40:07

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- First besides Qualcomm to commercialize single chip. Adoption by overseas market products will be a measure stick for the chip’s success

By Yun Sang-ho crow@ddaily.co.kr

Digital Daily

Samsung Electronics took another step to reduce its dependence on Qualcomm by successfully integrating and commercializing application processor (AP) and baseband on a single chip. The first smart phone that adopts this application process is Samsung’s ‘Galaxy Win’ introduced on Nov. 5. Samsung is the first company besides Qualcomm to commercialize a single chip and produce a smart phone with it.

According to Samsung, Galaxy Win launched on last 5 is equipped with the company’s first single chip application processor ‘SHANNON222’ which is a result of collaboration between Samsung’s Mobile Business Division and System LSI Division. It integrates Long Term Evolution (LTE) modem with a 1.4GHz Quad Core AP.

“Galaxy Win is equipped with Samsung’s single chip solution,” said a Samsung insider. “This is the first ever that Samsung’s one-chip solution is adopted in a Samsung smart phone.”

Nam-sung Woo, Samsung Electronics’ President and Head of System LSI Business Division said at ‘Samsung Analyst Day’ on last 6, “We started shipping the single chip mobile AP integrated with a modem from last Sep. Products equipped with the chip will be in the market soon.”

Galaxy Win is sold through SK Telecom and LGU+, and the handsets for LGU+ will support up to 3 frequencies concurrently. As it doesn’t support LTE Advanced despite of multiple frequencies support, Samsung seems to have not secured Carrier Aggregation technology yet, which combines different frequency bands as one.

Since LTE’s introduction, Samsung has been using its own APs and baseband modems on its smart phone devices for the domestic market such as Galaxy S3 LTE, Galaxy Grand, Galaxy Pop and Galaxy S4 Zoom, and has been thriving to upgrade its own modem chips. As seen before during the process to advance modem chips, Samsung is likely to produce 1 or 2 more handset devices before it moves to LTE-A single chip.

In the mean time, the success of Samsung’s single chip will depend on whether it will be used for the company’s overseas targeting products, because it will propel the volume. It’s not a handicap that the chip doesn’t support LTE-A because Korea is the only country with commercial LTE-A service for now.