你可能会认为发展近40年的半导体市场已十分成熟，早就没有这种争议存在；但消费设备创新的快速步伐持续致力于在产业中建立起小型生态系统的生命周期。这些产品生命周期迫使业界新旧厂商不断地评估我们过去曾经面临的许多相同决定。
其次，如果使用了一款和竞争产品一样的处理器，那可能会让产品设计难以和竞争产品进行明显的产品区隔。随着市场成长以及竞争加剧，半导体解决方案的数量通常也随之增加，智能手机处理器的情况就一直是这样的。
事实上，以为OEM拥有了专业技术与资源，就能够满足产品性能要求，也能够保有所想要的上市时间表──在设计一款新处理器时，所有的这些假设都是难以实现的。此外，公司还必须能够负担得起进行这一风险行动的巨大成本。
目前估计一款新处理器的损益平衡点约在1亿个左右。虽然对于一些自行设计处理器的公司而言，这一数字要求可能可以再低一点，但至少也要确保有80万个单位，才能摊销设计的成本。
事实上，目前的智能手机市场规模也仅能容纳少数几家处理器供货商拥有获利空间(根据In-Stat统计，2011年全球智能手机市场约有4.538亿部的销售量)，这对于一家OEM或甚至是大部份的处理器供货商而言，想要在此取得良好的投资报酬率(ROI)并不容易。
不过，三星的智能手机部门一直采用来自多家厂商的处理器，他们注重的是产品的性能、可用性以及其最大客户──无线厂商的要求。因此，苹果公司在自行设计处理器模式方面确实有其独特性。
联发科手机芯片业务的六成，是来自许多知名不高的中小型中国手机厂商；谢清江将其中部分在中国本地具品牌知名度、但没有出货至海外的厂商定义为二线，包括深圳业者金立通讯(Gionee Communication Equipment)、OPPO Electronics、BBK等。
这些ODM手机厂较大成分是制造者，而非设计者，其中有数家位于上海的厂商，是委托包括联发科在内的外部研发团队协助其工程方面的任务，例如芯讯通(Sim Com Wireless Solutions；为晨讯科技旗下子公司)。
针对这些二、三线伙伴，联发科可提供完整的参考设计解决方案协助他们加速产品上市时程；据了解，这类手机厂商通常自己负责产品的显示器、内存容量等方面的设计，其余与Android平台客制化设计相关的细部工作就交由联发科工程师负责。
联发科表示，该公司拥有上百名Android软件工程师，可协助客户进行客制化设计；由于PC大厂正尝试由“预铸”式的微软(Microsoft) Windows平台，跨足Android原始世界，这类人才在台湾也受到高度重视。
藉由在2007年收购ADI的基频芯片部门，联发科投入整合式手机芯片开发的时间将对较早；展讯则是在去年藉由投资MobilePeak取得基频技术。谢清江表示，联发科最新一代芯片采用40纳米制程，预计明年将推出28纳米制程设计。
China unknowns may be next smartphone stars
Rick Merritt
Mediatek president Ching-Jiang Hsieh has been forging tight links with China’s handset makers, believing they will be the source of the next big wave of smartphones. BARCELONA – Ching-Jiang Hsieh has been forging tight links with China’s handset makers. The president of Mediatek believes they will be the source of the next big wave of smartphones.
“We will sell 50 million handset chip sets this year, up from 10 million last year,” said Hsieh in an interview with EE Times at the Mobile World Congress in late February. “This year feature phones will decline for the first time—they were almost flat last year—because smartphones are growing,” he said.
Market watchers agree. As many as 600 million smartphones will ship in 2014, and as many as half of them will be low cost models replacing feature phones, according to Linley Gwennap, principal of the Linley Group (Mountain View, Calif.). Chips that integrate apps processors and basebands will power 70 percent of those handsets, up from 40 percent in 2010, Gwennap predicts.
Likewise, Strategy Analytics said China overtook the US as the world’s biggest smartphone market in the third quarter of 2011. The shift was largely thanks to China’s cellular carriers who bought lots of models that cost less than US$160, making it the fastest growing segment.
Whether Mediatek can lead this new wave is an open question. The Taiwan company is battling with one of China’s fastest rising fabless companies, Spreadtrum Communications Inc., that also has its eyes on this market.
Like Mediatek, Spreadtrum recently released GHz-class ARM Cortex A9 applications processors to serve the market for smartphones that hit a $100-$160 price point. Smartphone chip giant Qualcomm also is focusing increasingly on integrated chips.
Hsieh said part of Mediatek’s edge is its relationships with and understanding of the China handset makers who he thinks will drive the shift. Four of China’s top handset makers--Huawei, Lenovo, TCL and ZTE—make up 40 percent of Mediatek’s handset business, and a diverse set of 100 other companies make up the rest, he said.
The big four are not only well known in China but have growing export businesses. Mediatek helps these OEMs quickly fill out the middle and low-end tiers of product lines.
Huawei’s HiSilicon group has been making its own applications processors for some time. The Shanghai based team announced a quad-core chip at Mobile World Congress with souped up graphics it claimed beat Nvidia’s Tegra 3.
A lot of attention gets paid to such image products by the gadget-crazed media. But that segment of the market will grow at a rate a little less than two percent over the next few years while the overall smartphone pie expands by as much as 45 percent, Hsieh said.
China's second and third tiers
The China handset OEMs who make up 60 percent of Mediatek’s business are not household names. Some are what Hsieh refers to as second tier companies who have a respected brand in China, but no real export business. They include three Shenzhen companies Gionee Communication Equipment Ltd., OPPO Electronics Corp. Ltd, and BBK.
Then there is a wider group of third tier players. These companies have no brands of their own. They make handsets on an ODM basis for retailers mainly in India and China who slap their own names on the phones.
Many of these ODMs are more manufacturers than designers. Several reside in Shanghai where there are plenty of external R&D teams from chip makers like Mediatek and others to help with the engineering work. They include companies such Sim Com Wireless Solutions Co. Ltd.
With all these companies, Mediatek has adopted an approach of providing full reference designs to speed them to market. The handset maker typically specifies the industrial design, perhaps the display and the amount of memory. Mediatek’s engineers handle the rest, including a lot of the work customizing Google Android for the particulars of the design.
Mediatek claims it has hundreds of Android software engineers who can help wrestle the open source code into the needs of a particular design. Such expertise is highly valued in Taiwan these days where the big computer ODMs there are trying to make the shift from Microsoft’s pre-baked Windows to the wild and wooly world of Android.
The Taiwan chip maker claims it has a tech edge over Spreadtrum, its Shanghai based competitor that is reportedly undercutting it in prices. Mediatek’s latest offering, the MT6515, supports the China TD-SCDMA standard and can handle high-end features such as auto-stereoscopic 3-D, thanks to technology borrowed from Mediatek smart TV chips.
Mediatek was relatively early getting into the integrated handset chips, acquiring the baseband group of Analog Devices Inc. in 2007. Spreadtrum acquired baseband technology just last year with its investment in MobilePeak. In addition, Hsieh notes his latest chips are in 40 nm process technology and he will push into the 28 nm node with designs coming next year.
It remains to be seen whether China and Mediatek ride the next big wave in smartphones, a wave coming from the bottom rather than the top. But this is clearly the phone zone to watch.