Apple’s increasingly fractious partnership with Samsung as a part supplier for its mobile and portable devices could end by next year, according to many sources from within the semiconductor industry. The company is likely to give a contract to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to build ARM SoCs for its next-generation devices, with the SoCs tentatively named “A6” and the deal expected to be struck sometime in 2012.
Rumors of a commercial relationship between the two companies began early in 2011, right before the introduction of Apple’s iPad 2 with its A5 processor. The rumors were later confirmed by other sources, which said that Apple would likely want to strike a deal with TSMC to move its processors for mobile devices to the 28 nm process of the foundry. However, later it was revealed that the A5 processors were made by Apple’s manufacturing partner Samsung, which had also manufactured the A4 processors that went into Apple’s iPhone 4 and the first iPad.
However, this was all before Apple started their case against Samsung alleging that Samsung had copied the design features of Apple’s iPad and iPhone in its Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab smartphones and tablets respectively. Despite this, Apple continues to source components and parts from Samsung for all of its devices thanks to contracts that were reportedly signed more than a year ago and before Apple launched its legal action against Samsung. However considering the huge amount of evidence that Apple has presented in that case alleging that Samsung had tried to copy the secrets that made the iPad and iPhone so successful, Apple is likely to see moving its production process to a company that isn’t going to compete with Apple as a better move.
Currently, Apple receives chips from Samsung that are manufactured on a 45 nm process. TSMC, however, produces mobile SoCs for its smartphone and tablet clients on a 40 nm process while Apple is working with TSMC to move to a 28 nm process as mentioned above. Moving to this process will allow Apple to get ahead of its competitors at least until the competition migrates to the same process. Gaining this competitive advantage might be yet another reason why Apple might prefer to cut out at least some if not all components that Samsung supplies to Apple’s supply chain presently.
There is a further possibility that Apple might opt to move to Intel if it could combine its own ARM designs with Intel’s latest 22 nm transistor-production process. This adds to the list of options that Apple has if it does choose to move on from Samsung.
