




I. Samsung Goes on the Offensive





II. From Friends to Enemies



However, the pair's relationship has been 


III. What Does Apple Claim?




The "fat iPad" design patent (

By contrast the iPhone design patents (




IV. What does Samsung Claim?




Apple is 


Again the answer here seems largely subjective.

V. Fallout of the Patent War




Samsung is 



Comments     Threshold


RE: Sounds like
By kitonne on 9/19/2011 12:08:54 PM , Rating: 5
Re: Moving to other suppliers - it is already in progress, see ElReg (Taiwan, if the reports are accurate).

Issue is that Apple is using custom chips, and you cannot move them very fast elsewhere. Apple is doing the high level design in Verilog/VHDL/whatever, and the result is compiled with the libraries provided by the ASIC vendor (Samsung in the case of the current CPUs used in iWhatever). After you have the first compiled output with no errors, the real fun starts: you have to look at the propagation delays and optimize the critical path through the device. This can take a LOT of time and iterations, on super-computer level monsters (many weeks, possible month). Then, you need to generate the test vectors used in production, and validate them to get 98+% coverage. All this work needs to be done BEFORE any silicon masks can be generated. After you get first silicon, you want to process three wafer lots (not in sequence) and look at parametrics (power consumption, leakages, input impedances, etc.) before you turn on high volume production, even for a digital chip like a CPU with very few analog blocks inside (PLL for the clock is one analog block present in most current CPUs).

Change to a new ASIC foundry? No problem, you start from the library compile step above - and you are anywhere between 4 and 9 month away from high volume production, if you do not hit any snags (like violating some of the new foundry's design rules in your VHDL code).

Issue is further complicated by the use of stacked silicon in the Apple CPUs made by Samsung - that packaging technology is not cheap nor widely available in the industry, and most likely has Samsung process patents all over it.

Good news for Samsung is that overall revenue from Apple is less then 2% of their total sales, so while it will be a negative to loose Apple chip sales, it is far from being a huge issue.

