In recent years, you have bought mobile phones. As long as you don’t know much about digital products, the configuration posted by manufacturers will be so confused.
What kind of The beast processor , certified screens, large pixel cameras, large capacity batteries, flash charging and super charging , etc., are densely packed with dense series.
manufacturers mostly do this for marketing and publicity purposes. In a better way, it has indeed allowed the public to understand what components a mobile phone is composed of.
But if you go back 12 years, let alone looking at the chip model, buying a mobile phone will not be fooled by Dixun’s sales.
Then this question is very interesting. has not yet developed the hardware configuration information of mobile phones. What chips do people use to install? You may not believe that
said that, from ancient times to the present, mobile phone chip has been upgraded and replaced by the communication protocol standard and is not unrelated to the upgrade of the communication protocol standard.
In other words, mobile phone chips are actually products under the communication protocol standards.
Whoever has the ability to master the key upgrade points of each generation of communication protocols will have the ability to control the dominance of mobile phone chips.
This time Tony uses mobile communication protocol as the lead, and we will talk to everyone about the ups and downs of the world's mobile phone chips along the way.
Before the mobile phone was invented, car phone is the real "Mobile phone" .
This thing sounds very high-end, but to put it bluntly, it is to stuff a set of landline devices into the car, so that the rich and wealthy people at that time could enjoy the fun of driving while calling.
. If this fun is put to the present, if you are caught, you will be fined 200 yuan. . .
Simply put, Douglas proposed the cellular network principle, which is to cover a whole large area in units of hexagonal cells.
Then the radio station connects these wireless signals to the entire signal network.
When there is a device moving between different cells, seamless frequency switching can be achieved to achieve the effect of mobile communication.
However, the car phone equipment at that time was not only bulky, but also very poor in efficiency. It is said that at the earliest, it only supported three people to be online at the same time, and it often took more than half an hour to make a car phone call.
Although the idea of cellular can greatly improve the service experience of in-car telephones, the communication facilities in the city at that time could not support this system, and Bell Labs could only do some small-scale research experiments.
Time came in 1973, Engineer of Motorola Martin Cooper (Martin Cooper) invented the world's first prototype of the DynaTac 8000X mobile phone.
Until this time, cellular network technology appeared again in people's field of vision.
It was not until 1983 that Motorola officially brought this "Big Brother" originator mobile phone DynaTac 8000X to the world for public sale.
was officially sold at that time, and it was estimated that the current price was about 9,000 yuan. . .
Don't laugh anymore. Today's manufacturers' press conferences are just a pity. In addition to the high price, this phone has been delayed from release to mass production for 10 years.
I believe smart friends have guessed that Motorola spent the past ten years to lay out the signal base stations needed for cellular networks. In the past ten years, Motorola burned about $1 billion on it.
And so much infrastructure construction funds have been spent only to meet the call needs of DynaTac 8000X " at that time, charging for 10 hours and calling for 35 minutes." mobile phone battery life. . .
even built the signal tower by itself. Needless to say, the chips in the DynaTac 8000X mobile phone are also made by Motorola.
Someone once took apart the ancestor of this phone and saw it. There were a pile of integrated circuit boards that were plugged vertically. What type of chip is used for
? The information recorded on the Internet is already difficult to find.
, but is generally composed of radio frequency chip that receives and transmits signals, and baseband chip 3.
The chip integration level at that time was not that high, and the layout inside the big brother was like the small computer case today.
But it is undeniable that this is the prototype of mobile phone chips now.
Although Motorola firmly occupied the name of "inventor of mobile phones" , the call quality of 1G network at that time was actually worse than expected.
This is because the 1G network uses analog signal . The advantage of this thing is that the transmission method is simple and signal transmission is easy to implement.
. The easier it is to succeed, the more unreliable it is. The anti-interference of the analog signal during transmission will be poor, and it will be disturbed by various noises. The farther the call distance of , the worse the call quality.
On the other hand, analog signals are also easily eavesdropped during transmission, and there are almost no obstacles.
Imagine if there is a business spy who is eyeing a boss's big brother, as long as he thinks, then the boss will probably be able to hear clearly which lover and which restaurant he eats cooked steak with at night.
Unless the boss is like the underground workers in the spy movie, he works as a riddle throughout the whole process and communicates with the other side with a code. . .
In short, the analog signal can no longer meet people's communication needs at that time, and mobile phones urgently need to find a more reliable communication solution.
mobile phone chips have truly begun to flourish, and we will have to wait until the 2G network era that entered after 1990.
At this time, digital signal step by step replaces analog signal. The amazing thing about
digital signal is that it can first break a piece of signal into binary encoding of "0101" , and then transmit the information in such a discrete form.After remote devices such as
are received, they will re-decode these digital signals into audio that our human ears can hear to complete information transmission.
In this way, the anti-interference of information transmission is not only guaranteed, but the confidentiality of information will also increase.
So at that time, the 2G network was bound to develop in the direction of digital signals.
On the other hand, the establishment of the first-generation communication protocol has given Motorola all the initiative. If any operator wants to use 1G technology, they have to pay a patent fee to Motorola.
is still a trivial matter. The biggest problem with 1G network is that the communication standards between each country were not unified at that time, and they could not go abroad by phone, and they could not roam.
After aggregation of telecom operators in several European countries, I felt that this was a good opportunity.
After all, who doesn’t want to be a unified global mobile phone communication standard like First Emperor unified weights and measures? Make a profit without losing money.
So they put aside the United States and Motorola, sat together, and formed a new standard called GSM (Global System for mobile Communication) .
In 1990, the first version of the GSM standard was completed. The original GSM provided a single radio frequency band of 900MHz throughout Europe. While improving call security, it also added the SMS (SMS) function on mobile phones.
Slowly, most countries around the world began to use the GSM standard. By 1998, GSM had more than 100 million users worldwide.
By the way, in 1994, China Mobile took the lead in Fujian Province to launch the first GSM digital mobile phone in China, which is later the "Global Connection" service.
You should know that in the past, if you had a black and white screen phone that could make phone calls and send text messages, the feeling would be no less than that of now, you have an expensive folding screen phone.
If you are a college student, your roommate next door may have to take the phone card downstairs to line up in front of the public telephone booth and call your beloved girl, and you can do it on the balcony of the dormitory.
It can be said that the mobile phone officially entered every household since 2G.
But if you want to realize the many benefits brought by 2G digital signal , it is definitely not enough to rely on the baseband chips of the previous 1G era. You also need to convert a wave of digital signal to an analog signal.
After all, the sound information still needs to be turned into audio so that the human ear can understand it. The "digital-to-analog conversion" work here in
requires a special coprocessor chip to handle it.
At this time, semiconductor giant Texas Instruments saw this opportunity and launched the famous OMAP series mobile processor.
This processor can be said to be a classic written into textbooks.
OMAP The concept of heterogeneous computing is proposed for the first time. In short, it is . "The industry specializes in ", a special chip to handle specific functions.
For example, if you want to process sound information, let the chip that can process sound information do this job.
Texas Instruments integrates a DSP (digital signal processor) chip into the OMAP processor, which solves the problem of delay and echo in the phone during the call.
This technology has brought the experience of making phone calls to a big step. Not only does Texas Instruments' mass-produced OMAP processors have also reduced the cost of manufacturers to build mobile phones.
As a result, more manufacturers have entered the mobile phone market, and mobile phones have become less high-ranking and more popular.
Although 2G has brought a qualitative leap to mobile phone calls, there are still many problems in terms of call.
For example, because of the limited bandwidth, the sound signal will be compressed to a certain frequency, losing some of the high and low frequencies. Therefore, at that time, there will often be situations where the vocals on the phone and the vocals in reality are inconsistent.
If you heard someone say something like before, "In the past, the sound on the phone was not my own voice, but was simulated by the computer." , then Tony will refute the rumors here today.
The sound is still my own voice, but because the compression loses part of the high and low frequencies, the sound on the phone will sound weird.
In addition to "call" , the most basic function of , adding sound quality buff, the 2G standard has also given rise to various manufacturers' research on other functions of mobile phones.
After all, there were many companies making mobile phones at that time. Only when there were many selling points could people attract people to buy.
Radio, snake-eating, taking photos, MMS, map navigation, and other functions were slowly stuffed into the phone since then.
so natural, if there are more functions, the more chips in the mobile phone will be. What does
look like? NPU ( network processor ), RAM (memory), DSP (digital signal processor ) , Codec (encoder ) and other chips have been successively integrated into application processors.
And in the 2G era, the one who can play with these chips best is Texas Instruments and Nokia .
At that time, Texas Instruments provided Nokia's god-level processor OMAP1710, using a 90nm process, covering Linux, Windows Mobile, Nucleus, Palm, Symbian OS and other mobile systems, and supports 2D graphics acceleration.
This processor is equipped with no less than 10 classic models of Nokia, including 630, 6680, N71, N72, N91, N92, E61, E62 , etc. It can be said that it created the peak period of the glory of the Nokia dynasty.
Nokia has countless classic works in the feature phone era. If you want to say that it will leave a deep impression on Tony, it must be the N-Gage series.
is a mobile phone that looks like a game handheld console. In addition to the built-in mini games such as Tomb Raider and " Sonic ", it can be regarded as the originator of " game mobile " .
On the other hand, Japanese and Korean mobile phones are also shining at this stage.
Like the DB series chips equipped with the A200 system developed by Ericsson for Sony Ericsson mobile phones, or the PSoC architecture that cooperates with LG and Cypress semiconductor are all products of this period.
The popular LG chocolate phone uses Qualcomm MSM6500 baseband chip ▼
2G mobile phones during that period were roughly the demands raised by mobile phone manufacturers, and semiconductor manufacturers then customized the system and chips of the mobile phone according to their needs.
, and XScale core series processors made by Intel for PDA devices at the same time, and Samsung S3C24 series processors are also the best mobile devices in the 2G era.
Everyone may be curious about what Qualcomm is busy with in the 2G era, why didn’t Tony mention it throughout the whole process?
In fact, Qualcomm in the 2G era also wanted to set standards, but it did not use the TDMA technology used in GSM networks, but turned to the more difficult CDMA technology.
things are like this.
communication standard, after all, is a physical job that compares the number of people who shake more people and who speaks louder.
GSM was established in Europe, but it has established telecom giants such as Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens , Alcatel and established a voice worldwide.
Qualcomm chose CDMA, which is more difficult to develop, and applied for all related patents, wanting to take the initiative in standard setting in its own hands.
In fact, CDMA has been proven very early that the system capacity is more than ten times that of TDMA. Unfortunately, the technology is mature too late and the demand for data volume of 2G is not that high, so I fell into a situation where I can't go up or down.
wait for Qualcomm to tinker with CDMA, and the GSM team on the other side has already been pulled up. Even if CDMA's technology is better than TDMA, those who enter Xianyang first are the king, the market has long been allocated by GSM.
CDMA At home in the United States, it has the support of two operators, Sprint and Verizon. ▼
At this critical moment, Qualcomm had to sleep on firewood and taste gall, preparing to fight to the end on CDMA.
The so-called "If you never forget it, there will be an echo." , I didn't expect this big move, which really made Qualcomm's CDMA the main standard in the 3G era. The biggest advantage of
And 3G network can reach a download speed of more than 120KB/s-600KB/s, which has increased by 30 times.
People's habit of pirated songs into mobile phones has become cloud music. Watching football games has changed from live broadcasts in pictures and texts to live broadcasts in videos, and the use of mobile phones has changed drastically.
Tony was still in high school at that time. During class, he often secretly bought traffic with his deskmates underground and watched the NBA's playoffs live broadcast together, and he was so happy.
Tianyi 3G fast is not unreasonable. ▼
At this time, the 2G communication standard "European Team" found that the setting of the 3G standard seems to be unable to bypass CDMA. What's more serious is that all CDMA's patents were bought out of by Qualcomm for . . .
This means that if they want to continue working on 3G, they can only hold a lot of Qualcomm payment fees for CDMA patents in their hands, commonly known as in the industry, "Qualcomm Tax" .
Of course, Qualcomm is not the only one who can make 3G basebands. At that time, there was a chip company called Infineon , which was also making 3G basebands and supplying the steadily Apple iPhone .
Infineon has provided them with 3G baseband chips since Apple second-generation iPhone 3G. However, due to their immature technology, the failure rate of 3G version of iPhone soared.
So starting from the fourth generation iPhone 4S, Apple replaced all the baseband chips with Qualcomm, and then there was a patent lawsuit between Apple and Qualcomm, which was a story later.
and functions like mobile online video and video call have also gradually become popular with the advent of 3G network.
, it is used one card and one card. ▼
It was from this moment that Qualcomm began to get on the stage and gradually tasted the sweetness of baseband chips.
Since Qualcomm has firmly held the patent of baseband chip in his hands, as long as the mobile phone manufacturer wants to make a 3G mobile phone, no matter what, it cannot escape the Qualcomm's "entry fee" .
Qualcomm has actively provided mobile phone manufacturers with a one-stop 3G mobile phone processor integration solution, and they have begun to bundle and sell mobile phone application processors and baseband chips.
This will cause Texas Instruments, which do not make baseband chips, to suffer a secret loss.
Texas Instruments' OMAP is not higher than Qualcomm's application processor, but the biggest problem is that it does not include baseband chips, and the manufacturer needs to purchase and debug them themselves.
For mobile phone manufacturers, the cost of debugging is far higher than the cost of purchasing integrated chip . Even if has a slightly worse performance in Qualcomm's mobile phone processor, it is not a key issue.
After all, Symbian system and early Android did not value performance so much. 3G is more important as the selling point of mobile phones.
After seizing this opportunity, Qualcomm officially gained a foothold in the mobile phone chip industry. The stall established by the
For the first time, Apple has used its self-developed A4 chip on the first generation of iPad.
Follow-up iPhone4 also uses A4 ▼
What's a pity is that Texas Instruments is sluggish after entering the era of smartphones, and Qualcomm's share of mobile phone chips is getting higher and higher.
After Texas Instruments announced the launch of the OMAP5 mobile phone processor in 2012, it silently withdrew from the mobile phone chip market.
This processor was not available in the end. ▼
Let’s talk about it again. After losing the initiative of 3G, "European Team" did not give up. Before the arrival of the 4G era, they tried every means to regain the initiative from Qualcomm.
You Qualcomm don’t have CDMA exclusive, so I might as well formulate a 4G standard as soon as possible. No matter what, you can’t just charge protection fees.
So "European Team" has also established an organization called LTE to cooperate with China to take the lead in the core technology of OFDM to fight Qualcomm.
This wave of operation has indeed made Qualcomm give up the cake in the communication patent.
On the one hand, Qualcomm had to deal with the antitrust investigation of EU , freeing up hands to deal with the patent lawsuit with Apple.
On the other hand, the IBM and Intel in the United States are also very unhappy with Qualcomm's exclusive CDMA protocol, so they created a new protocol called WiMAX without Qualcomm playing.
After all, no one wants to see the situation where a company is dominant.
Unfortunately, at that time, WiMAX's technological maturity was much behind LTE's FDD and TDD, and it failed to bear the banner of fighting against LTE. In the end, the 4G standard's voice fell on LTE.
grew and grew, and China and Europe eventually became the biggest profiters of the 4G protocol standard.
Although Qualcomm is targeted by the
You should know that in the 4G era, as long as you mention Android phones, you will inevitably talk about Qualcomm's chips, and the two have almost become a fixed combination.
In short, from Snapdragon 800, 810, 820 to 835 and
At the same time, mobile phone software and hardware support such as QC fast charging protocol, mobile phone maximum pixel, video encoding format, screen resolution/refresh rate , has become more and more abundant with the update and iteration of chips.
Although Qualcomm has made a lot of popularity during this period, other technology companies are not vegetarians. We can do the mobile phone chips that Qualcomm can build!
Apple's self-developed A-series chips, such as Huawei HiSilicon Kirin, MediaTek's Helio, Samsung's Orion
and other mobile phones with names that can be called SoC chips have also begun to enter people's vision during this period.
The former domestic light MediaTek Helio ▼
Major mobile phone brands have risen rapidly during this period relies on hardware and pile materials , and have blossomed. Even at the mobile phone press conference, we can see the famous scenes of manufacturers promoting mobile cameras vs. professional cameras .
From this time on, people have pursued higher and faster mobile phone performance.
mobile phones are gradually deviating from its inherent product settings, and more and more people will focus on What else can mobile phones do .
manufacturers have also realized how great an advantage a powerful mobile phone processor will bring to themselves in the mobile phone market where you roll me.
If the impact of 4G communication protocol on the development of mobile phone chips is not so direct, then the arrival of G can be said to have once again redefined the order of mobile phone chips.
And the rulemaker in the 5G era is China's Huawei.
If you want to become the maker of information and communication, you have a technology on communication protocol . The technology brought by Huawei to 5G is related to channel encoding, called polarization code (Polar code).
polarization code is a new idea of channel encoding method, proposed by Turkish scientist Erdal Arıkan after 30 years of painstaking research.
It is a major breakthrough in informatics . Compared with traditional Turbo codes and LDPC codes, it can approach Shannon's limit, and polarized codes find a way to reach the theoretical value of Shannon's limit . What method is used to make
? Tony's little head is completely unintelligible, but it really shocked scientists in the information science community.
At that time, no one thought that polarized code would become the 5G standard for future practices, but Huawei felt that polarized code was a good opportunity to enter the 5G protocol standard.
Unexpectedly, at the communications industry standard formulation conference held by 3GPP in 2016, the LDPC code and polarized code were passed to jointly undertake the 5G communications industry standards.
Therefore, Huawei all in polarization code has made comprehensive efforts in 5G's infrastructure construction, base station laying, and self-developed chip , and has grasped the initiative of the world to enter the 5G era.
In 2019, Huawei launched the Kirin 990 with built-in 5G baseband. At that time, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 used the external 5G baseband solution.
plug-in 5G is better or built-in 5G. There are indeed different opinions, but as the whole world enters the 5G era, Huawei has undoubtedly made a good start.
During that time, Tony thought this would be a wonderful beginning for China to lead the world's communications industry.
But no one expected that in order to suppress Huawei's leadership in the 5G field, the United States would pick up a patent stick and impose a comprehensive technical blockade on Huawei, and forcefully pulled it out of the position of 5G leader. Everyone knows what happened next to
.
HIS chip cannot be built, 5G chips cannot be used, and in the end, new phones can only use Qualcomm's 4G chips to rescue the emergency.
Nowhere to talk about desolate. . .
is still sighing. At present, 5G is not very clear for most people.
Tony feels that in addition to being able to experience the signal advantages brought by 5G in the crowded venues and exhibitions , there is no big difference between other usage scenarios and 4G networks.
G The speed is fast, and the traffic costs that will be gone are also real.
It is true that today's 5G is a new feature, if a mobile phone does not have it, it will be considered a lack of performance.
In 2022, one mobile phone can cut off the charger, but without 5G, it seems that it is not the case.
It is an iteration of cutting-edge communication technology, and we are still in it.
What will happen in the future Tony doesn't know, but it is still hindering the direction of mobile phones and mobile phone chips, let's wait and see.
Tony believes that the development of mobile phones and the future of mobile phone chips are not only that.
World Economic Forum predicted in 2015 that by around 2023, humans may develop the world's first mobile phone chip implanted into the human body, so as to truly make the hand become "machine" .
vision is very beautiful, but Tony thinks that perhaps the launch of implantable mobile phones itself must have been born with a certain communication standard. It is unknown whether
is 6G or 7G.
However, according to the current lack of chips in the world, implantable mobile phones may have to wait for more than ten years to be launched. . .
In the future, it will be "Metauniverse" or cyberpunk , mobile phones will exist as a device that humans cannot live without in our entire life.
It is like a part of human beings beyond their physical functions, constantly helping us explore and connect to this increasingly changing world.
When the cost of communication and communication becomes lower and lower, the mobile phone will become flatter and flatter.
When it really comes to that time, perhaps the communication itself will become a basic human right.
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