choice. In the lead-up to the launch of the iPhone, Samsung saved Apple
from calamity.
In February 2006, David Tupman, Apple’s vice president for iPhone
and iPod engineering, realized that he was a year away from shipping the
first iPhone—but he didn’t have the main processor ready, or even a time
line for creating one. Fortunately, Apple’s hardware engineers were already
getting their chips for the iPod from Samsung. Tony Fadell, one of the
leaders of the iPod team, asked Hwang’s team if they could produce a chip
for Apple to the iPhone’s specifications.
Hwang’s employees could—by modifying a chip currently used for a
cable box. Apple gave Samsung an impossible deadline: to create a chip for
the iPhone in five months. It did not tell Samsung what the chip was for.
Hwang sent a team of engineers to Cupertino to work beside Apple’s
people. Samsung built a chip “as fast as they’ve ever built a chip in a
[fabrication lab]. Normally it takes days per layer, and it’s twenty or thirty
layers of silicon you’re trying to build,” Tupman said. “Normally it’s months
and months to get your prototypes. And they were turning this around in six
weeks. Crazy.”
When the iPhone’s semiconductor chip—its nerve center—was
completed, the transistor count in each chip was a remarkable 137,500,000,
a number possible due to the breakneck pace of Hwang’s law. (The first
Intel microchip, in 1971, had only 2,300 transistors.)
Meeting their impossible deadline, Hwang’s team shipped the
components two months before the product announcement. The new
iPhone booted up fine. But when the engineers tried to push the system, it
crashed due to an unknown flaw. Steve Jobs declared an emergency.
Apple’s engineers sat down with Samsung’s team to look for ways to get
more bandwidth from the chips.
In the end, the iPhone was completed on time. On January 9, 2007, Jobs
walked onto the stage at the Macworld convention and unveiled his beloved
product.
“This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for two and a half years,” he
said.
Without Hwang’s vision for mobile chips, the iPhone would not have
come into existence as quickly as it did—an Apple engineer admitted it
wouldn’t have been released on the time frame Apple had set if it hadn’t
been for Samsung’s scorching speed in creating the semiconductor chip for