What are the differences between the chips in 5G mobile phones and the 4G era

2019 is the first year of 5G mobile phones, and 2020 is the year for the comprehensive development of 5G mobile phones. Now that most of 2020 has passed, what changes have 5G mobile phones undergone, and what trends will it drive? We have organized the information in each module.

Today, let’s take a look at what has changed in terms of chips.

PS: The content of the article is organized and analyzed by eWiseTech engineers according to the information in their own search library. The specific equipment that appears can be searched in the eWiseTech search library.

Processor and Architecture Changes

Of course, the most important thing in a mobile phone is the processor. When 5G was first released, due to technical reasons, an external baseband design was chosen. However, this design requires at least the addition of baseband + baseband memory + baseband power chip, which takes up a lot of space on the motherboard. Therefore, the earliest 5G mobile phones are usually solved by a double-layer board design, and the cost is also higher.

Therefore, the 5G mobile phones released in 2019, such as: Samsung S10 5G and Note10+ 5G; Huawei Mate 30 Pro 5G and Nova 6 5G; IQOO Pro 5G; Xiaomi 9 Pro and ZTE Tianji 10 Pro, all adopt a double-layer board design. In the past 20 years, the double-layer board design has only been found in IQOO3.

The baseband solutions of the same manufacturers are different, for example: Qualcomm X50M and Samsung Exynos 5100 baseband chips integrate baseband memory chips.

But HiSilicon’s Balong 5000 baseband memory is not integrated. Instead, two ways are used to place the independent chips, one is the POP stacking package, where the memory chips are stacked and soldered on the baseband; the other is directly placed on the motherboard. However, the early 5G solution of HiSilicon is more troublesome than the baseband solutions of Qualcomm and Samsung.

However, this situation did not last long. At the end of 2019, HiSilicon Kirin 990 5G, Samsung Exynos 980 and Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G all implemented 5G basebands with built-in processors.

This design has a great advantage in reducing the area of ​​the motherboard. For example, in Huawei’s early Nova6 5G and later P40 motherboards, the Nova6 5G processor + baseband occupies a total area of ​​5.7cm.

But in the P40, because the processor has a built-in 5G baseband, it only needs 2.1cm? , which greatly saves the motherboard space. And this does not include the capacitors and resistors required for the main chip, so the double-layer board design is also gradually eliminated.

And most 5G mobile phones released in 2019 usually only support one mode, and now 5G mobile phones already support SA/NSA two modes, MediaTek Dimensity 820 processor has also realized 5G + 5G dual card dual standby in Redmi x10 , I believe that the popularization of 5G dual card dual standby will not be too long.

RAM

Then there is the memory side, where DDR4 has been in development for a few years and finally made a breakthrough in 2020. Xiaomi Mi 10 is the first to use LPDDR5 chip, which is better than LPDDR4X in terms of speed and power consumption. However, due to the high cost of LPDDR5 chips, there are not many mobile phones using LPDDR5 chip solutions. At present, there are only Xiaomi Mi 10, Samsung Galaxy S20 and IQOO3. The flagship phone is used.

WiFi

Because WiFi 6 has higher network transmission speed, better multi-device connection performance. Therefore, it has basically become the standard configuration of major flagship phones, but WiFi6 mobile phones need WiFi6 routers to achieve it. Among the 5G mobile phones released in 2020, eWisetech has dismantled IQOO3, Xiaomi Mi 10, Red Magic 5G and P40. In addition, IQOO Pro 5G, Xiaomi 9 Pro 5G, Realme X50 5G, etc. also chose Qualcomm’s previous generation WiFi6 chip WCN3998.

Xiaomi Mi 10’s WiFi chip solution, Qualcomm QCA6391 and 2 QORVO front-end module chips.

Red Magic 5G WiFi chip solution, QCA6391 + 2 NXP WiFi front-end module chips.

The Hi1105 WiFi6 chip of the P40 is unknown which company the WiFi front-end module chip uses.

This time, engineers from eWiseTech summarized the development of various chips in 5G mobile phones. In terms of cameras, screens, etc., there are naturally many changes in mobile phones. Next time, let’s take a look at 5G mobile phones, what are the changes in other mobile phone modules, and let’s take a look at the development trend of mobile phones together.

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