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 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.
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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.
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...