Rumor: Apple to develop its own power management chips

Apple reportedly plans to develop its own power management chips for use in iPhones. This move would be in line with the strategy to be less dependent on external chip designers.

Currently, Apple uses integrated circuits from the British company Dialog Semiconductor, but from next year the first alternatives developed by Apple could already be used in iPhones. According to a source from the Japanese newspaper Nikkei. Another source confirms the claim, but reports that it could also be 2019 before the chips are ready.

These are so-called power management integrated circuits, or pmics. These play a role in charging, battery management and energy consumption. Apple wants to be less dependent on third parties for the most important chips in its products and also better connect the hardware to its software. Apple’s regular chip manufacturer TSMC would take care of the production. That Taiwanese company now also makes the pmics for Dialog Semiconductor.

At the beginning of this year, an analyst already claimed that Apple wanted to push Dialog Semiconductor aside for its own chips. Then Reuters also reported that Apple had set up design centers for the pmics in Munich and California and assigned about 80 engineers to the designs. Dialog Semiconductor is said to have relied on Apple for 70 percent of its revenue in 2016. At the beginning of this year it was announced that Apple is designing its own GPU. Apple has been designing the A-line of socs for iPhones and iPads in-house for some time. The company has incorporated the M-line of co-processors, for processing sensor data, into its A-socs. In the past, NXP designed the M co-processors with ARM Cortex M3 core.

Source: TechInsights