PCBA
The engine of a smartphone is PCBA. The module houses multiple components including SoCs, RF components, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NAND and DRAM among others. Each component powers a different aspect of a phone.
Some of the top SoCs companies are Hisilicon, Qualcomm, Mediatek and Unisoc. While Huawei owns HiSilicon, MediaTek is a Taiwanese company. Unisoc is based in China. The US-based Qualcomm, however, is considered superior among the mobile chip players.
The catch is that their chip design is primarily sourced from ARM Holdings, a UK-based firm but with chip designs containing “US origin technology”. These SoCs operators secure a license from ARM for their own chips. Without ARM, as seen in the case of Huawei, it becomes very difficult for a smartphone brand to build a chip that’s been designed from scratch.
Counterpoint in its recent report said, “All of Huawei’s smartphones run on ARM architecture. The current chipsets already designed may not be affected, but the newer chipsets for late Q4 2019 will not be able to use ARM’s license. This will affect even smartphone sales in China.”
“Qorvo, Skyworks, and Broadcom RF components will be hard to replace for Huawei’s high-end LTE smartphones,” it added.
As far as connectivity goes, 3GPP makes basic standards for 3G, 4G, and 5G standards. Major players like Qualcomm, Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE and many other players own IPs for this. In a shared arrangement, a brand may have a few workarounds to secure radio license but may end up missing out on some.
In the case of Huawei, SD Association temporarily banned the company, resulting which future Huawei phones may miss out on supporting or using microSD cards. Even Wi-Fi Alliance “temporarily restricted” Huawei.
Imagine a phone without memory and Wi-Fi support.
“Semiconductor design and development is a very capital and knowledge intensive business. Successful silicon companies spend billions of dollars on R&D annually, which is anywhere between 10-20% of their revenues. This should also be backed with support from best technology institutes. So essentially, all such technologies including their IPs are owned, co-developed or controlled by one or the other US company,” Kawoosa explained.
Operating system
The software situation is a bit more complicated. Also, note that the operating system and chipset are co-related.
“The OEMs get drivers from the chipset maker which in turns sources design from the likes of ARM. To write the operating system you have to use their architecture and write drivers that can talk to the hardware for proper implementation,” said Harsha Halvi, co-founder of TGB Labs working in area of mobile and SAAS apps.
“If you want to build an operating system, you have to bypass all these drivers and write them on own. For instance, Huawei uses ARM-based in-house Kirin chipsets. Huawei is writing its own drivers and they have greater control over the system. So they have to write drivers first and on top that they have to write kernels. After that, they can build their own operating system. But it is very difficult for a new or existing company with no such R&D backing to do so,” he added.
Since the extinction of OSes such as Windows Mobile and BlackBerry, there hasn’t been any competition for Google’s Android. Samsung does offer Tizen OS, but the software failed to take off on phones and is currently limited to wearables and TVs. Apple and its closed software ecosystem are also out of the question.
Without Android or Google’s open-source AOSP, the mobile OS will not be able to replicate the same experience that you get on your phone. For starters, you will lose access to all key Google applications ranging from Gmail to Search. Let’s not forget other third-party applications such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Skype, Amazon, Netflix, and others. Users will be forced to sideload applications instead of regular apps tore.
In China, where Android is already blocked, you have some alternatives to all of these applications but these alternative apps are unlikely to gain traction in other markets.
One can either create a new app store with a customised version of these popular applications or simply rely on mobile browser versions of the same. You, user, already know the stark difference between using an app and opening a browser version of the same. From a user experience point of view, a custom OS without top apps will be bland at best.
Bottomline
The challenges that a hypothetical Brand X is facing today could be a reality tomorrow, for everyone. The case of Huawei clearly stresses the need for an open-source framework which gives an equal opportunity to all smartphone companies regardless the country of their origin. It’s also a good wake up call for these firms to invest more in IPs and be more self-sufficient in the future.