Is Qualcomm In Trouble?

Qualcomm’s activities in China may lead to regulatory penalties for the chip vendor, this time from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over bribery allegations.

The company is currently facing an anti-monopoly probe from Chinese authorities for allegedly overcharging clients. Qualcomm  has also said that the SEC may also consider penalizing the company, as part of an anti-corruption investigation.

The SEC’s Los Angeles Regional Office has made a preliminary decision to recommend that the SEC take action against Qualcomm for violating anti-bribery controls, the company said in its second quarter report. The accusations involve Qualcomm offering benefits to “individuals associated with Chinese state-owned companies or agencies,” the report added.

Both the SEC and the U.S. Department of Justice have been probing the company over alleged violations of the nation’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

In cooperation with those official investigations, Qualcomm said it’s found instances of preferential hiring, and giving gifts and other benefits to “several individuals” with China’s state-owned companies. The gifts and benefits amounted to less than US$250,000 in value.

If the SEC takes action against Qualcomm, penalties could include giving up profits, facing injunctions, and other monetary penalties, the company said. Earlier this month, Qualcomm filed a submission with the U.S. regulator, countering any claims of wrongdoing.

Qualcomm is facing the investigations at a time when China is increasingly become a bigger part of its business. The nation is the world’s largest smartphone market, and more Chinese device manufacturers are expanding globally.

Last year, however, Chinese regulators began investigating Qualcomm due to complaints from industry groups. The company was allegedly abusing its market position and charging higher fees for its patent licensing business. In November, Chinese authorities conducted two surprise raids of Qualcomm offices in China for documents.

Chinese regulators could decide to penalize Qualcomm by confiscating financial gains made, and even imposing a fine of 1 to 10 percent on its revenues for the prior year, the company said in its quarterly report.

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MediaTek To Offer New LTE SoC

MediaTek has shown off one of its most interesting SoC designs to date at the China Electronic Information Expo. The MT6595 was announced a while ago, but this is apparently the first time MediaTek showcased it in action.

It is a big.LITTLE octa-core with integrated LTE support. It has four Cortex A17 cores backed by four Cortex A7 cores and it can hit 2.2GHz. The GPU of choice is the PowerVR G6200. It supports 2K4K video playback and recording, as well as H.265. It can deal with a 20-megapixel camera, too.

The really interesting bit is the modem. It can handle TD-LTE/FDD-LTE/WCDMA/TD-SCDMA/GSM networks, hence the company claims it is the first octa-core with on board LTE. Qualcomm has already announced an LTE-enabled octa-core, but it won’t be ready anytime soon. The MT6595 will – it is expected to show up in actual devices very soon.

Of course, MediaTek is going after a different market. Qualcomm is building the meanest possible chip with four 64-bit Cortex A57 cores and four A53 cores, while MediaTek is keeping the MT6595 somewhat simpler, with smaller 32-bit cores.

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Intel Buys Into Altera

Technology gossip columns are full of news that Intel and Altera have expanded their relationship. Apparently, Altera has been Intel’s shoulder to cry on as the chip giant seeks to move beyond the declining PC market and the breakup of the Wintel alliance. Intel took the break up very hard and there was talk that Alteria might be just a rebound thing.

Last year Intel announced that it would manufacture Altera’s ARM-based quad-core Stratix 10 processors, as part of its efforts to grow its foundry business to make silicon products for third parties. Now the two vendors are expanding the relationship to include multi-die devices integrating Altera’s field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) with a range of other components, from memory to ASICs to processors.

Multi-die devices can drive down production costs and improve performance and energy efficiency of chips for everything from high-performance servers to communications systems. The multi-die devices will take advantage of the Stratix 10 programmable chips that Intel is manufacturing for Altera with its 14-nanometer Tri-Gate process. Intel’s three-dimensional transistor architecture combined with Altera’s FPGA redundancy technology leads to Altera being able to create a highly dense and energy efficient programmable chip die that can offer better integration of components.

At the same time, Intel officials are looking for ways to make more cash from its manufacturing capabilities, including growing its foundry business by making chips for other vendors. CEO Brian Krzanich and other Intel executives have said they will manufacture third-party chips even if they are based on competing infrastructure, which is the case with Altera and its ARM-based chips.

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Can MediaTek Challenge Qualcomm?

A top analyst has said that Qualcomm has nothing to fear from Media Tek’s announcement that it is gunning for the smartphone market.

Qualcomm rules North America and Europe while right now MediaTek is best known for being the leading player in the Chinese market. Now there are signs that MediaTek seems to have reached the maximum market share that they can achieve in China and will be looking to go after Qualcomm in other markets.

But Jefferies analyst Peter Misek views MediaTek’s cunning plan as more of a medium to long-term threat to Qualcomm versus a near-term threat.

He commented, “The high-end smartphone market is saturated and while we believe that pricing and subsidy pressure will become more severe globally, Qualcomm has significant opportunities through integration, iPhone 6, and royalty collections in China.”

Of course it is optimistic to think that the iPhone 6 will do well in China. Many analysts have lost their lunch money betting on Jobs’ Mob doing anything in China.

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Qualcomm Acquires Patents From HP

Chip making giant Qualcomm Inc has purchased a patent portfolio from Hewlett-Packard Co, including those of Palm Inc and its iPaq smartphone, in a move that will bulk up HP’s offerings to handset makers and other licensees.

The portfolio comprises about 1,400 granted patents and pending patent applications from the United States and about 1,000 granted patents and pending patent applications from other countries, including China, England, Germany, Japan and South Korea.

The San Diego-based chipmaker did not say how much it paid for the patents.

The majority of Qualcomm’s profits come from licensing patents for its ubiquitous CDMA cellphone technology and other technology related to mobile devices. Instead of licensing patents individually, handset vendors, carriers and other licensees pay royalties to Qualcomm in return for access to a broad portfolio of intellectual property.

The patents bought from HP, announced in a release on Thursday, cover technologies that include fundamental mobile operating system techniques.

They include those that HP acquired when it bought Palm Inc, an early player in mobile devices, in 2010 and Bitfone in 2006. HP tablets made using Palm’s webOS operating system failed to catch on.

“There’s nothing left at Palm that HP could get any use out of so it’s better to sell the patents, which are always valuable to Qualcomm,” said Ed Snyder, an analyst with Charter Equity Research. “They have to keep that bucket full.”

The new patents will not lead to increased royalty rates for existing Qualcomm licensees, a Qualcomm spokeswoman said.

Last year, HP sold webOS, which it received as part of the $1.2 billion Palm acquisition, to South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc.

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T Mobile Sees Growth

T-Mobile US has reported a fourth-quarter boost in customer growth and offered to pay customers to ditch rival service providers, escalating already intense competition in the U.S. wireless market.

The company, the No. 4 U.S. mobile operator, promised payments of up to $350 per line to consumers who break their contract with any of its bigger rivals and switch to T-Mobile.

The offer came just days after AT&T Inc promised a $200 credit to T-Mobile customers who switch. While AT&T also offered up to $250 for switching customers who trade in their phone, T-Mobile said it would pay up to $300 for trade-ins.

The companies have been targeting each other because they use the same network technology, making it easy for consumers to bring their phone when they switch, but some on Wall Street are concerned they will cause an industry-wide price war.

T-Mobile said it hoped that whole families as well as individuals would switch to its service in response to the new cash offer, which is aimed at covering early contract termination fees typically charged by wireless operators.

John Legere, the outspoken chief executive of T-Mobile, said he hoped the offer would end the “industry scam” of family plans, which tie entire families into long-term contracts.

Legere joked that AT&T’s recent offer would actually play to T-Mobile’s advantage because it would allow AT&T customers to try a different service with less financial risk than before.

“If it doesn’t work they’ll pay you to come back,” Legere said in announcing the offer at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

T-Mobile, which is 67 percent owned by Deutsche Telekom, managed to turn the corner on four years of customers losses in 2013 by criticizing its rivals and promoting its service plans as being more flexible and consumer friendly.

It said it added 1.645 million net customers in the fourth quarter, up from 1.023 million in the quarter before, marking its third quarter of customer growth for 2013.

The fourth-quarter additions included 869,000 valuable post-paid customers, which was up 13 percent from the third quarter, according to the company.

It said customer defections, known in the industry as churn, stayed at third-quarter levels of 1.7 percent and compared with 2.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012.

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LPDDR4 Smartphones Coming Next Year

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A modern phone with 2GB of memory works just fine and since all Android chips and the OS itself support 32-bit mode only, it doesn’t makes much sense to jump over 3.5GB anytime soon.

Still, 64-bit support for Android might be coming after all and Samsung has a solution for people who want more than 3GB on their phone. Samsung has announced the first 8 gigabit (Gb) 4GB RAM module based on low power double data rate 4 (LPDDR4 memory).

It is a 20nm chip and has the lowest energy consumption and higher density to date. Four 8Gb dies combine to offer a single 4GB module we should see them in smartphones and tablets in the near future.

With 3.1 Gbps bandwidth the new LPDDR4 can deliver a 50 percent speed boost over the existing DDR3 and LPDDR3 based chips. Samsung also claims that LPDDR4 will enable a data transfer rate per pin of 3,200 megabits per second (Mbps), which is twice that of the 20nm-class LPDDR3 DRAM.

The Samsung claims that the chip needs 1.1 volts which is 40 percent less than what you would need for 20nm DDR3 chips and mass production starts in 2014.

It is not known when we can expect to see phones and tablets based on LPDDR4 anytime soon, but a dreamer can hope that phones such as Samsung Galaxy S5 might end up using one. After all this should be the next big thing, at least this is what Samsung wants you to believe.

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NSA Spies With Tracking Cookies

The browser cookies that online businesses use to track Internet customers for targeted advertising are also used by the National Security Agency to track surveillance targets and break into their systems.

The agency’s use of browser cookies is restricted to tracking specific suspects rather than sifting through vast amounts of user data, theWashington Post reported Tuesday, citing internal documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Google’s PREF (for preference) cookies, which the company uses to personalize webpages for Internet users based on their previous browsing habits and preferences, appears to be a particular favorite of the NSA, the Post noted.

PREF cookies don’t store any user identifying information such as user name or email address. But they contain information on a user’s general location, language preference, search engine settings, number of search results to display per page and other data that lets advertisers uniquely identify an individual’s browser.

The Google cookie, and those used by other online companies, can be used by the NSA to track a target user’s browsing habits and to enable remote exploitation of their computers, the Post said.

Documents made available by Snowden do not describe the specific exploits used by the NSA to break into a surveillance target’s computers. Neither do they say how the NSA gains access to the tracking cookies, the Post reported.

It is theorized that one way the NSA could get access to the tracking cookies is to simply ask the companies for them under the authority granted to the agency by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Separately, the documents leaked by Snowden show that the NSA is also tapping into cell-phone location data gathered and transmitted by makers of mobile applications and operating systems. Google and other Internet companies use the geo-location data transmitted by mobile apps and operating systems to deliver location-aware advertisements and services to mobile users.

However, the NSA is using the same data to track surveillance targets with more precision than was possible with data gathered directly from wireless carriers, the Post noted. The mobile app data, gathered by the NSA under a program codenamed “Happyfoot,” allows the agency to tie Internet addresses to physical locations more precisely than was possible with cell-phone location data.

An NSA division called Tailored Access Operations uses the data gathered from tracking cookies and mobile applications to launch offensive hacking operations against specific target computers, the Post said.

An NSA spokeswoman Wednesday did not comment on the specific details in the Post story but reiterated the agency’s commitment to fulfill its mission of protecting the country against those seeking to do it harm.

“As we’ve said before, NSA, within its lawful mission to collect foreign intelligence to protect the United States, uses intelligence tools to understand the intent of foreign adversaries and prevent them from bringing harm to innocent Americans and allies,” the spokeswoman said.

The Post’s latest revelations are likely to shine a much-needed spotlight on the extensive tracking and monitoring activities carried out by major Internet companies in order to deliver targeted advertisements to users.

Privacy rights groups have protested such tracking for several years and have sought legislation that would give users more visibility and control over the data that is collected on them by online companies.

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Bluetooth 4.1 Goes IPV6

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has announced Bluetooth 4.1, the first version of Bluetooth to lay the foundations for IPV6 capability.

The first hints of what the Bluetooth SIG had planned for this new version were revealed to The INQUIRER in October during our exclusive interview with Steve Hegenderfer at Appsworld. There, he revealed his aspirations for the Bluetooth protocol to become integral to the Internet of Things.

At the front end of Bluetooth 4.1, the biggest change for users is that the retry duration for lost devices has been increased to a full three minutes, so if you wander off with your wireless headphones still on, there’s more of a chance of being able to seamlessly carry on listening upon your return.

Behind the scenes, devices fitted with Bluetooth 4.1 will be able to act as both hub and end point. The advantage of this is that multiple devices can share information between them without going via the host device, so your smartwatch can talk to your heart monitor and send the combined data in a single transmission to your smartphone.

This sort of “pooling” of devices represents an “extranet of things”, and the technology can therefore be applied to a wider area in forming the “Internet of Things” too.

The other major additions are better isolation techniques to ensure that Bluetooth, which broadcasts on an unregulated band, doesn’t interfere either with itself or with signals from other protocols broadcasting at similar frequencies, including WiFi.

The Bluetooth protocol has retained complete backwards compatibility, so a new Bluetooth 4.1 enabled device will work seamlessly with a Bluetooth 1.0 dongle bought in a pound shop.

In addition, Bluetooth 4.0 devices can be Bluetooth 4.1 enabled through patches, so we should see some Bluetooth 4.1 enabled hardware arrive early in 2014.

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Tizen Announces New Partners

Samsung and Intel announced on Tuesday that the open source Tizen operating system now has 36 partners, including eBay, Trend Micro and Panasonic.

The full list of new partners was announced at the Tizen Developer Summit, and includes a mix of firms from different sectors. Among the 36 backers are eBay, Nokia’s Here mapping service, Konami, McAfee, Panasonic, Sharp and The Weather Channel, giving us some insights as to what software applications are likely to appear on the Linux based operating system.

Trevor Cornwell, founder and CEO of Appbackr, one of Tizen’s newly added partners, said that his firm found the operating system appealing due to its open nature, perhaps hinting that it is more open than Google’s Android mobile operating system.

He said, “The Tizen OS promises to be the most open and comprehensive software platform available for those companies wishing to target the consumers of connected devices.

“The Association’s commitment to support HTML5 applications, combined with their vision that extends beyond the smartphone and tablet ecosystem to a wider array of other connected device segments, makes it attractive to all types of companies. We look forward to collaborating with the Tizen Association to ensure that all stakeholders can contribute to the development of a platform for this growing market opportunity.”

It’s still unclear when Samsung’s first Tizen powered smartphone will make it to market, but online speculation suggests we’ll be seeing the firm’s debut Android challenging smartphone at some point in 2014.

Further speculation suggests that Samsung’s first Tizen phone will be an updated version of the Galaxy S4, possibly to reduce its reliance on Android.

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