Longtime Apple supplier Broadcom today announced that it has signed two multi-year deals with Apple that cover a "range of specified high-performance wireless components and modules" that Apple will use in its products.

According to Broadcom, these new agreements are in addition to a prior agreement it established with Apple in June 2019 for RF components and modules. The new agreements will last for three and a half years beginning in January 2020.

broadcom
Broadcom says that the two new deals combined with its existing 2019 deal could generate aggregate total future revenue of approximately $15 billion.

As pointed out by Bloomberg, Broadcom's announcement allows potential purchasers to know that they're getting an established business relationship with Apple. Broadcom has been exploring a sale of its radio frequency chip unit since last year.

Top Rated Comments

konqerror Avatar
70 months ago

Broadcom? I just assumed they got all this from Qualcomm which they signed up with last year as well.
This is mainly for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chipsets. Nothing to do with cellular chipsets. The article could make this a bit more clear.

Broadcom's once-huge client Wi-Fi business has been decimated by the combination of Intel's bundling and Ralink/MediaTek from Taiwan. They already sold the IOT business to Cypress. Similarly, their mobile business is under pressure from Qualcomm and MediaTek integrating these pieces into their baseband. I think their infrastructure AP/home router business is what's left.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
randolorian Avatar
70 months ago
After reading today's WSJ article, I bet they got a terrible deal.
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)
avtella Avatar
70 months ago
Qualcomm and Intel seem to have better client side chips. Qualcomm even on the router/AP side also seems better but I can see Apple wanting to counterbalance vendors, which is practical from a business perspective.

Broadcom’s WiFi chips generally seem to be inferior to Qualcomm since the first Wave 2 AC chips came out at least in terms the extras such as MU-MIMO where they actually at times could reduce performance significantly and even in AX in testing by SmallNetbuilder their AX chipset based routers showed a weird dip in performance in the 5Ghz band. I can imagine the client side chips like the ones Apple buys are just as lacking, the again of course I could be wrong...
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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