The $600 million that Samsung currently owes Apple for patent infringement may be a drop in the bucket for the $180 billion conglomerate, but for a while it looked as if the dispute could have a serious long-term impact on Samsung’s chip business. Samsung temporarily lost Apple’s business, but now it looks like it the Korean giant will once again supply microprocessors to both the world’s leading makers of smartphones: itself and Apple.
Samsung will make the A9 processor for a future generation of the iPhone, according to The Korea Economic Daily. According to the report, Samsung’s new contract with Apple starts in 2015. Since the current contract between the two companies does not expire until 2014, there will not be much of a gap between the two. However, it appears that Samsung will miss out on at least one iteration of the iPhone, with Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) supplying processors for the next version of the smartphone.
Apple will buy an estimated 200 million mobile application processors from Samsung this year under the current contract. Samsung is in the process of upgrading the Austin, Texas manufacturing facility that produces Apple’s processors, as well as memory chips. Samsung is investing up to $4 billion dollars to shift production in Austin from memory chips to mobile processors.
The A6X chip that Samsung currently produces for Apple is made using a 32-nanometer process. According to the Korean news source, TSMC will produce the next generation of processors for Apple using a 20-nanometer process. Then Apple will return to Samsung in 2015 for a microprocessor made using a 14-nanometer process. Samsung reportedly won the business by developing 14-nanometer models ahead of TSMC. A 14-nanometer process, which has also been achieved by Intel, is the smallest reported by any chipmaker so far. The smaller dies cut chip prices and reduce power consumption because with a smaller die each transistor needs less power when it switches on.
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