Can someone explain in simple or even not so simple terms what each of these companies have in the iPhone or other smartphones? They are often listed as competitors, but as I’ve seen it all have a piece of the pie. What exactly is each of their slices and how might they compete today or in the future?
Thank you,
Jeff
Semiconductor family
SWKS - Global Positioning System (GPS)
QRVO - supplies RF solutions that perform various functions in the complex cellular radio front end section of smartphones and other cellular devices.
AVGO - four segments: wireless communications, enterprise storage, wired infrastructure and industrial.
APPLE watch’s and Disney’s Majjic Band.
Quillnpenn - who was a Principle IC (integrated Circuits) Layout Designer designing complex state of the Art computer chips, Hand crafted Standard CMOS Library Cells, I/O Library CMOS, Cells for over 41 years before being laid off May 1st, 2007 in the guise of organizational changes.
Google something like “iPhone 6 teardown”, and you’ll find the geeks’ breakdown of every chip and piece of interesting hardware inside it. Likewise for just about every flagship device out there (like the Samsung Galaxy S6). That’s the best way to actually SEE what’s in them in instances where companies don’t or can’t break it down for you at a dollar or component level.
In the iPhone 6, for example, Skyworks packages are in there to handle the LTE radio (the stuff that actually lets your phone talk to the towers for data and voice), while on the S6, Samsung has its own RF chips and uses some Skyworks components for other stuff.
Examples:
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+6+Plus+Teardown/29206…
https://www.chipworks.com/about-chipworks/overview/blog/insi…
(FWIW, I own an S6 … and SWKS stock … and AAPL stock)
SWKS - Global Positioning System (GPS)
They have a lot more than that in there. At the very least, iFixit reports that they have power amplifier modules and GPS and cellular filter modules. And remember that these are modules, which in turn contain many Skyworks components acting in concert, which is a big reason the company can continue to increase content and margins: it delivers these higher-level, custom integrated solutions that are high value to its customers, rather than just selling discrete components that the customers integrate themselves. As the solutions become significantly more complex over time, they not only deliver better value to the customers (solving huge, critical problems), but also utilize more Skyworks components internally, naturally leading to higher content overall.
How and why are they becoming more complex over time? Because as people increasingly rely on their devices for wireless signals (whether cellular, wifi, bluetooth, GPS, Zigbee, etc), and more devices in an area are making use of wireless signals all at the same time in tight frequency ranges, it becomes very important to solve signal interference problems, increase data throughput to support higher and higher speeds, use as little power as possible to maximize battery life, and to shrink the physical size of the modules so that manufacturers can pack more stuff into thinner and thinner phones. All of these problems are hard, and making significant progress on them all simultaneously is even more difficult. The days of device manufacturers buying a bunch of discrete components and doing it themselves are long gone – they simply don’t have the expertise to do it, and there are plenty of other problems they need to focus their time on solving. They’re happy to go to Skyworks and say “we need all these crazy wireless things to happen in our device we’re shipping 3 years from now, and we need it to happen within these crazy constraints – make it so.” And Skyworks does. It’s a win/win.
It’s also worth mentioning that Skyworks has a technology platform that allows them to customize even for small players, allowing those manufacturers to optimize for the feature set they’re delivering without the overhead of excess stuff they don’t need or the hassle of trying to integrate it all themselves. That’s one of the things that makes Skyworks attractive to such a broad array of device manufacturers, rather than limiting its appeal to just the high-end.
Neil
Long SWKS
Neil,
will sell SKWS after the next red bar appears. Same for AAPL.
http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=SWKS&p=D&yr=0&m… In on 2/12 out we wait !
Quillnpenn - A professional Swing Trader.