Apple’s top chip engineer who worked for 9 years is joining Samsung

Apple has lost one of its top chip experts to Samsung. Kim Woo-Pyeong has joined Samsung after his nine-year stint at Apple. Kim joined Apple in 2014 after working for companies such as Qualcomm and Texas Instruments previously. While Kim’s exact responsibilities are not clear, he was among Apple’s top semiconductor experts that played a crucial role in the development of the company’s wide range of chips.

As reported by Business Korea, Kim will be Samsung’s new company director for a new packaging solution centre. Samsung, which, over the past few years, has scaled up the production of in-house chipsets with an increased R&D, looks to tackle the competition from TSMC, Apple, and other companies. Samsung is one of the oldest chipmakers but it lost ground to companies that entered the chip manufacturing industry much later. To bolster its portfolio, Samsung recently announced that it had started producing the 3nm chips using a new transistor architecture.

Samsung vs Apple

Apple makes chips ranging from the ones that power its devices such as the iPhone and Mac to the ones that enable various technologies like ultrawideband. It also now makes 5G modems to minimise its dependency on suppliers such as Qualcomm. But the spotlight has recently been on Apple’s ARM-based M-series chips that power an increasing range of Macs and iPads.

However, the report calls Samsung’s latest hire from Apple “somewhat unusual.” It said that despite their long-running rivalry in a few sectors, Apple and Samsung have had a cooperative relationship. Both companies work together in major areas, such as OLED displays. Apple iPhone’s recent Pro models use Samsung-made OLED displays. Especially, the iPhone 13 Pro series uses Samsung’s exclusively-developed LTPO OLED displays for variable refresh rates. This year’s upcoming iPhone 14 Pro series is also likely to use Samsung displays for advanced technology.

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