Qualcomm executive identifies three major niche sectors for Taiwan supply chain in next decade
Jay Liu, Taipei; Willis Ke, DIGITIMES
Taiwan supply chain players can enjoy lucrative business opportunities in three major sectors in the next decade of the 5G era, namely mmWave technology, 5G infrastructure equipment, and PC chips revolution, according to Roawen Chen, senior vice president and COO of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies.
Chen said the first mmWave private network jointly set up by Qualcomm, Chunghwa Telecom and ASE Technology at one of the backend house’s smart plants in Kaohiung, southern Taiwan, has officially ushered in business opportunities for mmWave applications.
Chen said only the popularity of mmWave technology, applications and networks can materialize real 5G scenarios imagined by people, allowing them to enjoy as fast wireless transmission speed as optical fiber. He said most of 5G handsets and infrastructure still adopt sub-6GHz specs, but the US has advanced to 28GHz and China may kick off construction of mmWave base stations in 2022, with Japan, South Korea and Europe also to jump on the bandwagon soon.
Chen stressed that at least half of the business opportunities for mmWave applications will come from segments beyond smartphones, and the production process for mmWave chips will see major changes, promising new growth opportunities for the entire supply chain. He continued that mmWave applications will see far larger business opportunities than sub-6GHz ones.
In terms of infrastructure equipment, the Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN) will provide new business opportunities for Taiwan’s networking hardware suppliers, according to Chen. Under the O-RAN architecture, telecom operators can easily get their software solutions through the open platform and what they really have to spend is just on hardware equipment, saving a lot on 5G infrastructure construction costs.
Taiwan’s networking equipment makers can tap deep into the market for small 5G cells by offering customer premises equipment (CPE) and other related solutions, as their solid manufacturing prowess and geopolitical advantage can help them easily win trust from international clients.
As to PC chips revolution, Apple has started to adopt Arm-based chips developed in-house, with better price-performance ratios than Wintel solutions, making Arm offerings no longer labeled as secondary solutions. Taiwan semiconductor supply chain is expected to become the core of Arm value chain, with foundry houses and IC designers able to find new footholds in the PC chips revolution, according to Chen.
