Chen Jiansheng nodded slightly and did not speak, Li Zhi also got up and left, and went to communicate with Qualcomm.

In fact, everyone knows that there are benefits of having their own processor.

But we all know how difficult it is to design your own processor.

If only the R&D funds and manpower investment are huge, Eternal Group can still support it.

But in the face of the bottomless patent vortex, it seems powerless.

Looking at Chen Jiansheng's expression, Chen Chen silently thought in his heart: "Do you want to design a processor?" ”

In Chen Chen's view, the earth's processor is quite backward.

According to the earth's technical standards, silicon, which is now the most widely used, is approaching the limit of materials.

In the past two years, graphene, which seems to be able to replace silicon, is actually not suitable for processors because of its material properties.

It sounds very lofty, and there are already physical quantum computers, limited by algorithms, and can only do some targeted and highly professional calculations.

Generalization is the biggest problem of quantum computers at present, and if you don't promote it, you may not be able to fully mature in your lifetime.

However, even if he comes up with a full set of general algorithms for quantum computers, quantum computers cannot be used for civilian use in a short period of time, let alone on mobile phones.

Because the theory and algorithm can be used when they are taken out, but it is too difficult to improve the manufacturing process.

Personal mobile phones and computers can only continue to use silicon for the time being.

In Chen Chen's view, there is still a lot of potential to be mined on silicon crystals.

Intel and Arm's latest processors, in their own opinion, are extremely backward.

If you use your own theory to redesign, in some specific environments, the performance can even be directly increased by dozens of times.

There is no difficulty in designing a processor for yourself.

The difficulty lies in patent barriers.

This includes two aspects: processor architecture and communication baseband.

Both of them are old and difficult problems, but compared to the previous one, the latter one is more prohibitive.

First of all, the processor architecture, the most common computer and server processors on the planet, is based on the x86 architecture.

At present, there are only two companies that can see products on the market, Intel and AMD.

As the most sophisticated technology product of America, as a magic weapon for Intel and AMD to make money, X86 authorization is not to be considered, and it is completely impossible to open to the public.

Then there's the most widely used mobile phone processor at the moment – ARM.

Unlike Intel and AMD, the owners of x86 processors, ARM, which owns the ARM processor architecture, does not produce mobile phone processors of its own.

ARM only designs and develops new processor architectures, and then makes a profit by charging external licensing fees.

Including Qualcomm Snapdragon, MediaTek Helio, Huawei Kirin, and Samsung Orion, they are all customized for secondary development on the basis of ARM's basic architecture.

Licensing of ARM processors is relatively easy to obtain.

But ARM is a mobile phone processor, a mobile phone processor, not just a processor, but an integrated chip, also known as SOC.

This involves the biggest difficulty, the communication baseband.

This is a real challenge that is even more powerless than the design of the processor.

In short, in order to be compatible with the earth's existing 2G, 3G, and 4G mobile communication networks, and to use the existing communication facilities, rather than updating the base station by yourself, it is necessary to integrate the corresponding mobile communication baseband chips.

The production of this baseband contains a large number of mobile communication patents.

Based on Chen Chen's first experience, the earth's mobile communication patent is a mudflat.

From the last century to the present, there have been countless manufacturers coming in and out, and a large number of technology patents have been generated.

These communication patents are basically in the hands of several communication giants such as Qualcomm, Nokia, and Ericsson.

Nokia, after selling its mobile phone business to Microsoft, still influences the entire mobile communications industry.

He still holds about 30,000 mobile phone patents and has been involved in the development and development of new mobile communication standards.

Nokia has seven times as many patents as Apple, covering 2G, 3G, 4G, and possibly 5G in the future.

More than 40 technology companies, including Apple, Samsung, HTC, Microsoft, Blackberry, LG, Sony, Huawei, etc., need to pay patent licensing fees to Nokia every year.

Samsung will pay Nokia 300 million euros a year in royalties, and Apple will pay nearly 400 million euros a year to Nokia.

Google, the owner of Android, spent $12.5 billion in 2011 to acquire the dying Motorola Mobility in order to cope with the ongoing patent war, obtaining more than 17,000 patents.

After the completion of the acquisition, Google cut Motorola's non-core business many times, and two years later, sold the brand and mobile phone business to Lenovo, leaving itself with useful patents.

Communication giants such as Nokia and Ericsson are influencing almost all mobile phone manufacturers all the time.

And the real giant of the mobile communication industry, Qualcomm, it affects the entire mobile phone industry.

Including other communication giants, they will be constrained by Qualcomm.

Qualcomm occupies 90% of the global CDMA chip market and has more than 3,000 patents for CDMA and related technologies, including 600 CDMA core patents.

In CDMA technology, Qualcomm has an absolute monopoly position.

It is not terrible to simply monopolize a technology, the key is that after monopolizing this technology, it can also promote this technology to become a global standard.

In 1999, with the support of the American government, Qualcomm's CDMA standard, which was exclusively led by Qualcomm, defeated the GSM dominated by Ericsson and many other manufacturers, and was accepted by the International Communications Alliance as the basis for the third generation of wireless communication technology.

Since then, the standards and core patents of mobile communication have all fallen into the hands of Qualcomm, and no one in the field of wireless communication can bypass Qualcomm's patents.

In the 3G era, in order to prevent Qualcomm from continuing to dominate, established European manufacturers such as Ericsson and Nokia have joined forces with new manufacturers such as Huawei in Asia to jointly develop and promote CDMA standard networks.

In the end, CDMA defeated Qualcomm's CDMA2000 in terms of technical maturity and market share.

However, as mentioned earlier, according to the standards of the International Communications Union, the standards of 3G technology are based on CDMA.

Therefore, in order to comply with international standards, CDMA must also be based on Qualcomm's CDMA.

In this way, it is inevitable to use a large number of underlying patents belonging to Qualcomm.

As a result, the communication standards developed to resist Qualcomm still have to pay royalties to Qualcomm, even though they have outperformed Qualcomm in both technology and market.

In CDMA in the 3G era, Qualcomm holds 25% of the patents, although the proportion is not as high as CDMA2000, but they are all basic core patents.

4G and even later 5G, Qualcomm's patent ratio will be further reduced, but as long as it is still on the road of CDMA, Qualcomm's level will continue to exist.

In the face of manufacturers, Qualcomm has also adopted a very clever pricing strategy - the pricing of the communication baseband is about the same as the price of the entire mobile phone processor SOC, including the baseband.

In this way, if you buy the baseband separately, you have to integrate a CPU and GPU by yourself, which is time-consuming, laborious and costly, and most mobile phone manufacturers do not have the technology and ability to integrate at the chip level.

Qualcomm's solution can be done all at once, which greatly reduces the threshold for manufacturing mobile phones.

Qualcomm's sales method is jokingly called "buy baseband, send processor SOC".

It is this sales strategy that drove Texas Instruments, the former No.1 mobile chip NO.1, out of the mobile phone chip market.

Moreover, Qualcomm has an extremely arrogant and domineering place, that is, reverse patent licensing.

Any company that buys and uses Qualcomm chips must license the communication patents held by the company to Qualcomm free of charge.

And this patent cannot be relied on to levy patent licensing fees on other mobile phone manufacturers that use Qualcomm chips.

That is to say, if you use Qualcomm technology at the same time, but also develop your own communication technology, then you must license your own patents to Qualcomm for free, and other manufacturers that use Qualcomm chips can also use them for free.