Qualcomm
We have some interesting news from Mobile World Congress. Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has been certified as “the world’s first commercially deployable iSIM (Integrated SIM)”. What is iSIM? Didn’t you just transfer the SIM card with eSIM? but the iSIM is better than his eSIM. Let me explain, simply put, the iSIM is the next step in the ongoing march to shrink the size of SIM cards.
OK, a SIM card is a small 12x9mm plastic card (minimum “nano” size) that physically sticks to your phone. SIM stands for “Subscriber Identity Module,” and these cards mostly only identify you to your mobile operator, allowing you to provision your device for cellular service that pays your monthly bill. increase. The idea is that if you buy a new phone or have multiple phones, you can easily move the service between phones if there are no compatibility issues by simply moving the SIM card.
In the old days, these cards stored actual data such as contacts and messages, but with the advent of smartphones, all that has moved to the cloud. You can store up to 265KB of data on the . That’s pretty scary data density considering a similarly sized MicroSD card can hold up to 1TB, or about 4.2 million times more data. In an industry that is very aggressive about saving space, SIM cards are a huge waste of space.
Do away with physical removable SIM cards and instead enter eSIM, the new standard of soldering a tiny chip onto your phone’s motherboard. They came to the Google Pixel line in 2017, iPhones in 2018, and some Samsung smartphones in 2021, and were used alongside physical cards in some models. The big tipping point for most carriers is that Apple will do away with physical SIM cards in his 2022 iPhone 14 models and move to eSIM only. Since eSIM-only devices have no removable cards at all, the absence of card slots simplifies the device design, saves space, and removes one potential point for water entry. Instead of sticking a hunk of plastic on your phone, you provision your device through some app, usually by signing into an account with your carrier. The tip of the is approximately 2.5 x 2.3 mm.
The eSIM is still a space-hogging chip on your motherboard, not ideal if you want to squeeze every square millimeter of space out of your phone. The next shrinking step is iSIM, an Integrated Subscriber Identity Module. Instead of being a chip on the motherboard, the iSIM is directly integrated into the SoC. SoC (system-on-chip) integration of Technology that enables smartphones. Instead of using 1,000 small chips for CPUs, GPUs, RAM, modems, and many more, we pack it all into one piece of silicon. Individual chips take up more space and power because you have to make motherboard traces to connect everything and you have to handle the chip packaging.
Putting everything on one chip with the smallest number of transistors is the cheapest, most space and power efficient way. Now the SIM card is disappearing into that big chunk. iSIMs are measured in fractions of a millimeter, and as part of an SoC, continue to shrink each year as chip process nodes reach even smaller nm measurements. This seems like the end of SIM technology. Not only does it help with phones, it’s perfect for ever more space-constrained devices, like smartwatches.
Of course, this will require the participation of carriers, and that is the main content of Qualcomm’s announcement. The iSIM solution on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, which is shipping now, has been certified by the global cell carrier GSMA. Qualcomm said, “The new iSIM is fully compliant with the GSMA remote SIM provisioning standard, which means its subscriptions can be managed remotely via any standard platform.” In theory, a carrier using an eSIM should not know the difference between his eSIM and an iSIM, as this is the same standard as the eSIM and all the same security requirements apply. iSIM is still just a chunk of silicon that requires software provisioning. The lifespan of silicon doesn’t matter to carriers.
Like many Qualcomm SoC components, the iSIM is built into the chip, but is optionally available. All current Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 smartphones use a separate eSIM chip instead of an iSIM. Now that the solution is certified, we are waiting for some phone makers to incorporate iSIM into their next product designs.
