Name: Why Apple And The FTC Are At War With Qualcomm
Uploaded: 2021-09-29T06:35:31.000Z
Duration: 12 min 59 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In 1985, a group of seven people, most of them engineers, and all of them

Adverbs of manner

formerly of the tech company Linkabit, formed a company called Qualcomm,

short for Quality Communications. Today, a few decades later, Qualcomm is

valued at almost $70 billion. But the path it's taken to get there is not without controversy.

The FTC is really going after Qualcomm's bread and butter.

When I saw Qualcomm doing it, first I thought that's never gonna work.

The optics of it don't look particularly good.

So what does Qualcomm actually do? Because it's not exactly a household name.

I think I've seen the name but I have no idea what they're doing.

Apple and Qualcomm have some kind of, there's like maybe some kind of patent infringement.

I think I have heard the name before but beyond that I couldn't tell you

anymore at all. And I haven't heard the name Qualcomm before.

Qualcomm is the company that has been over the years developing a lot of the

fundamental technologies that make cellphones work. And we license that

technology to a horizontal model that any company can come in. The other

part of the business is our semiconductor business and we produce chips

for phones and for everything that the mobile industry has been

transforming. You should assume that the absolute majority of the phones

So fundamentally, Qualcomm invents and licenses technologies and designs

semiconductor chips. And as a result it has a massive amount of patents,

over 130,000 if you include patent applications, and today licensing those

patents accounts for more than half of its operating income. R&D has been

a big focus of the company since the beginning. Qualcomm's first big win

was pioneering a new wireless technology in the late 80s called cdmaONE,

which in 1995 became one of two industry standards for the way cellphone

networks work. Along with the competing GSM technology, it defined the 2G

area of cellphones. This, along with its growing portfolio of

telecommunications patents was what initially secured Qualcomm's position in the industry.

They really held a monopolistic position in 3G and 4G. They had the

patents, they were the first, they were the best. Every phone you will see

in the U.S., you know a few years ago, had Qualcomm modems in them.

In every single generation of wireless, Qualcomm had contributed the

fundamental technology that actually made that possible.

When it comes to chips, it's important to note that Qualcomm is a fabless

microchip company, which means it designs them but contracts out their

actual production. And it's most well known for a line of processors it calls "Snapdragon."

So what we do is we build the core processor that sits inside the cellphone.

Qualcomm's really known for something called an "SOC," which is a system on a

chip. That's really a computer on a chip.

So you can think of the system on a chip kind of like the human brain, the

system on a chip in a phone is very similar. So you have a lot of

disparate functions but they all work together cohesively with system

software and that's what the system on a chip does. If you look at the

communications portion of the chip itself, let's say back in 2012 is 100

megabits per second. Five years later it was a gigabit per second. So more

than a 10 fold increase over five years. And now as you move to the 5G

generation we're looking at another 10x improvement in speed that the

And right now 5G is a huge deal to Qualcomm.

We started investing in 5G technology over 10 years ago, waiting for this

moment that would come in 2019 and now we're right on the cusp of that happening.

If you go back in time and you looked at 2G, what did 2G bring? It brought

digital voice, right? So your call was more clear. Then 3G and 4G emerged

and that was about more than voice, it was about connecting to the

internet. But 5G will expand much beyond that. 5G will enable machines to

talk to machines with high reliability. For example an automobile.

Automobiles, autonomous driving is emerging. So you want a very reliable,

high speed communication between automobiles. That's possible with 5G.

A lot of the connectivity features, the 4G and the 5G technology, and the

telematics modules that allow us to have Wi-Fi hotspots in the car and

leveraging content from the outside. Or even a lot of the cellular V2X

technology of getting time-to-green and light information as well as

safety features directly from other cars. You're going to start to see

that technology very soon in the coming years.

In the beginning it's going to be very mobile broadband centric. That means

we're going to have smartphones which are going to have, we can experience

much higher data rates and much lower latencies. And that is going to

So 5G is not just a marketing term. It's an actual set of new standards,

ultimately defined by the International Telecommunication Union, that will

lay out how the next generation of cellphones and other mobile devices

will work. But how soon we'll actually be able to buy those devices and

have the systems in place to make use of their 5G tech is yet to be seen.

A lot of times in the semiconductor industry our marketing outpaces our

engineering. So when people say "oh 5G's here," not so much. It'll be

years in the making. 3G and 4G Qualcomm dominated the industry. Some

people say they may have behaved badly as a result, they were very,

monopolistic behavior, and that's good for Qualcomm but that's not good

for the industry. 5G is gonna be much more open. Many more companies are

participating in it. There's no way Qualcomm is going to have the same

Another big focus for Qualcomm right now is artificial intelligence.

Qualcomm began our research on AI over a decade ago with Qualcomm AI

research. And in about 2015 we started integrating AI onto the chip. What

that means is we put special processing capability into our chips to

When you combine fast communications with 5G with incredible computational

capability with AI then you really have a platform that'll change the

But alongside Qualcomm's history of innovation is a complex legal history.

In March of 2018 the Trump administration blocked an attempted hostile

Qualcomm takeover by competitor Broadcom, citing national security

concerns. A few months later Qualcomm itself failed to acquire another

chip rival, NXP, when it couldn't get Chinese regulatory approval. But its