Qualcomm LTE Modem Competitors? Samsung, Intel, Mediatek, Spreadtrum, Leadcore... or simply CEVA!

By SemiWiki

April 6, 2015

What is common between the 4G LTE modems from Samsung, Intel, Mediatek, Spreadtrum or Leadcore? All these chips are architecture with CEVA XC4000 family supporting 4G LTE-Advanced, LTE, HSPA/+, W-CDMA, TD-SCDMA, and legacy GSM/GPRS/EDGE. Samsung organization is vertical, the company design and manufacture DRAM, NAND and logic IC (System LSI) like Exynos 7420 octa-core application processor and Modem 300 Series, all these chips being integrated into the Galaxy S6 smartphone, as recently shown by Chipworks in this teardown: Samsung Shannon 333 Modem, Shannon 533 PMIC, Samsung S2MPS15 PMIC, Samsung Shannon 928 RF Transceiver and Samsung Shannon 710 Envelope Tracking IC.

Samsung is targeting high end smartphone market enjoying 326 million units shipped in 2014, directly competing with Apple (191 million units in 2014) on this segment. If you look at the modem market share, Apple integrates Qualcomm's MDM9x35 cellular modem when Samsung integrate their in-house modem into the Galaxy S6 smartphone… except maybe in the US! In fact, In order to work properly on Verizon and Sprint networks in the United States, smartphones still need to support CDMA technology. More likely Qualcomm's MDM9x35 cellular modem will be integrated into Samsung’s smartphone sold in the US. With more than 500 million units shipped last year, Apple and Samsung cumulated market share in the high end smartphone segment is in the 70-80% range. It’s reasonable to say that Qualcomm own 50% share… and that CEVA powered modem the remaining 50%, on the high end segment.

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