8 ms·

On Glass, we actually went to Broadcom and had them on the ropes for fixing parts of their firmware. Sadly, we couldn't bring those fixes out of the closed sour

On Glass, we actually went to Broadcom and had them on the ropes for fixing parts of their firmware. Sadly, we couldn't bring those fixes out of the closed source world of hardware, so it's still up to the system integrator to fight those battles...

qbasic_forever 6y ago
Serious question, why doesn't Google build its own bluetooth & BLE chips? Please put some competition on Broadcoam and the like and either push them entirely out of the market (good riddance), or force them to step up their game.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Building radio ASICs is a world rife with patents. Pretty much nobody new can enter the market.
  - mandelken 6y ago
    Care to expand? Is that why Software Define Radio is still so much a niche and expensive?
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      Nearly all modern radio chipsets are mostly software defined. That includes WiFi, LTE and GPS. The radio frontend is typically a downmixer and then straight into digital. Some of the typically "software" bits like FFT's, various encodings, checksums, clock recovery etc. are frequently done in digital hardware acceleration blocks for performance, and saving power. If you were writing the firmware of the device, you needn't use them though. With enough human years of effort, you could take almost any radio hardware for sale today and repurpose it to speak nearly any other radio protocol in similar frequency bands. Performance will probably be terrible though! It's rare people do this though - all the chips don't have their firmware documented (again mostly to avoid publishing documentation that proves they are violating someone elses patents), and many have various cryptographic elements that makes reverse engineering hard. The one exception to this is WiFi chips used in the Nexus 5 by Broadcom, which has had a reasonable amount of reverse engineering because Broadcom accidentally published the source code because the firmware code was in part shared with published Linux kernel driver source code.
      - exikyut 6y ago
        > all the chips don't have their firmware documented (again mostly to avoid publishing documentation that proves they are violating someone elses patents) :O Enlightenment moment :(
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      There are a gazillion patents on radio related stuff. Nearly all standards have associated patents. Companies already in the industry typically have cross-licensing agreements - ie. I can use your patents if you can use mine. Either that or they just violate each others patents knowing that a patent war would be mutual destruction and in neither companies interests. But a newcomer has nothing to offer - the minute they release any product, every incumbent company will go through their patent portfolio and sue them out of the water.
      - mandelken 6y ago
        Yikes, that sounds pretty harsh. So how would a new player be able do enter? I thought only the hardware could be patented, not the software, and so SDR would level the playing field, but that's perhaps too naive?
  - bosswipe 6y ago
    Aren't they considered "essential patents" that must be made available at a reasonable price?
    - extropy 6y ago
      Generally yes. But you would need to spend 3 years in court to get that to work.
      - exikyut 6y ago
        Follow-on question for the sake of debate: what if you got a bunch of smaller wannabe startups and interests backing a group effort to do exactly this for a pool of things? Would the legal fees scale linearly? :/
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  Google's involvement in any kind of hardware is already a distraction from their core product line. Making their own chips is a distraction on a distraction. Distraction might not be the right word but I can't conjure up the right one. Hardware is one of the end goals for Apple, for example. For Google, Android hardware is not. It's just there to serve their goal of selling ads.
  - qbasic_forever 6y ago
    IMHO those dynamics are changing. Custom chips are becoming table stakes for new products. Look at Apple M1, W1, or Amazaon's Graviton2 chips. All of those are core parts of products and services which would not be possible without the custom silicon. The pool of talent and resources to build these things is extremely small, and there are geopolitical issues putting ever more pressure and scarcity on them (i.e. China pivoting to reduce dependency on Western designed chips and hoovering up as much chip design talent as possible). The TL;DR is amazing new hardware and services need custom silicon, but custom silicon is only getting more difficult and more challenging to build in the near future.
- LASR 6y ago
  I've heard RF-anything is quite hard to get right. One of the reasons why Intel was dumped for XMM modems is because they were just slower than Qualcomm.
- mondoshawan 6y ago
  I can't speak to this directly because of numerous reasons, chiefly among them being that I don't get to make those decisions. Standard disclaimer follows: I rejoined in the last two years, what follows are my opinions, these opinions are my own, blah blah. Android has never been about driving the hardware narrative -- it's always been about building a phone with mostly open contributions and driving the start of a wedge to open up the phone industry a bit. It's always been a software answer to a hardware problem, even today. Prior to Android, all we had were closed source low powered feature phones and Blackberries. That being said, building silicon is non trivial work, and building a BLE stack and controller is even more so. Will a solid BLE stack sell phones? Hard to say how it could drive that narrative, realistically, and even harder to say if such a controller could be made cost effectively. Given Android's archetype (software solution to closed hardware), this puts such a project into a much more difficult position politically and financially. I can't see this kind of thing having much in the way of legs in a large corp. That being said, I do think if a startup could challenge this landscape, it is a HUGE opportunity.
  - qbasic_forever 6y ago
    Yeah from the Android platform side it would be weird to build chips. For products like the Pixel phone though, that would be a great place to innovate. And realistically, Google needs to get into the custom chip game sooner rather than later... GCE needs to start competing with Amazon's Graviton ARM processors. The sooner you get the expertise and talent to churn out chips (and maybe even a fab or two?), the better. The global shortage for fab usage and chips could kind of force your hand soon.
    - vlovich123 6y ago
      Google doesn't have the volume on its first-party hardware to drive something like this yet & they would never start with BLE chips. Additionally, there's some really good vendors out of China already challenging BCOM & QCOM FWIW, which further complicates the "build it yourself" narrative (look at the Pixel buds which have an AirPods-like experience running a Chinese BLE chip for the buds which other Western vendors weren't able to match). The Android org generally isn't the right org to build hardware, let alone do chip design. Maybe the camera team got closest when I worked there? Source: worked on Pixel Buds @ Google & was one of several engineers responsible for selecting the chip vendor. We got source access to the entire stack/OS except for the microcode & some parts of the stack they hid. I found BES a way better partner to work with than the BCOM/QCOM mess.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cptskippy 6y ago
  > Serious question, why doesn't Google build its own bluetooth & BLE chips? There is a lot of overlap between WiFi and Bluetooth & BLE such that you just have a Wireless chip that does both. In fact I think with Bluetooth 4 the file transfer profile just establishes an adhoc WiFi network. You don't have separate Bluetooth and WiFi chips anymore. Furthering that, in the mobile space the Wireless capabilities are usually integrated into the mobile SoC. So you don't even have separate chips for CPU and Wireless. About the only time you see a separate Wireless chip is when a new technology is emerging like 5G and it's usually only an external chip for a generation or two until it can be integrated into the SoC. So, if you were to design your own Bluetooth chip today you would also be designing a WiFi chip and then you'd probably just roll all that into a SoC with a CPU. No small feat.
  - mrpippy 6y ago
    > In fact I think with Bluetooth 4 the file transfer profile just establishes an adhoc WiFi network. This was a feature of Bluetooth 3.0, but almost nothing ever used it. I was once at a big BT testing company and asked about it, and they had like one device that could do it (a crazy feature-packed HTC WinMo device I think). And then Bluetooth 4.0 added BLE, and it seems like there hasn't been much development of classic BT since then.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- ay 6y ago
  Tangential - in the BLE land nrf52832 and friends are pretty neat, and there is an ongoing work on the rust stack: https://github.com/jonas-schievink/rubble https://github.com/jonas-schievink/rubble I tried it and it can do a few basic things, though it’s in the early stages, apparently.
  - parwan98 6y ago
    Nrf52 are great BLE chips, however the full bluetooth spec (classic+BLE) is orders of magnitude more complex...
- mcshicks 6y ago
  Getting good yield/performance on the radio is non trivial. Aside from having domain experts you have a pretty significant investment in equipment to do the testing. Broadcom and other semis split that cost over many customers.

qbasic_forever 6y ago

Serious question, why doesn't Google build its own bluetooth & BLE chips? Please put some competition on Broadcoam and the like and either push them entirely out of the market (good riddance), or force them to step up their game.

londons_explore 6y ago
Building radio ASICs is a world rife with patents. Pretty much nobody new can enter the market.
- mandelken 6y ago
  Care to expand? Is that why Software Define Radio is still so much a niche and expensive?
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Nearly all modern radio chipsets are mostly software defined. That includes WiFi, LTE and GPS. The radio frontend is typically a downmixer and then straight into digital. Some of the typically "software" bits like FFT's, various encodings, checksums, clock recovery etc. are frequently done in digital hardware acceleration blocks for performance, and saving power. If you were writing the firmware of the device, you needn't use them though. With enough human years of effort, you could take almost any radio hardware for sale today and repurpose it to speak nearly any other radio protocol in similar frequency bands. Performance will probably be terrible though! It's rare people do this though - all the chips don't have their firmware documented (again mostly to avoid publishing documentation that proves they are violating someone elses patents), and many have various cryptographic elements that makes reverse engineering hard. The one exception to this is WiFi chips used in the Nexus 5 by Broadcom, which has had a reasonable amount of reverse engineering because Broadcom accidentally published the source code because the firmware code was in part shared with published Linux kernel driver source code.
    - exikyut 6y ago
      > all the chips don't have their firmware documented (again mostly to avoid publishing documentation that proves they are violating someone elses patents) :O Enlightenment moment :(
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    There are a gazillion patents on radio related stuff. Nearly all standards have associated patents. Companies already in the industry typically have cross-licensing agreements - ie. I can use your patents if you can use mine. Either that or they just violate each others patents knowing that a patent war would be mutual destruction and in neither companies interests. But a newcomer has nothing to offer - the minute they release any product, every incumbent company will go through their patent portfolio and sue them out of the water.
    - mandelken 6y ago
      Yikes, that sounds pretty harsh. So how would a new player be able do enter? I thought only the hardware could be patented, not the software, and so SDR would level the playing field, but that's perhaps too naive?
- bosswipe 6y ago
  Aren't they considered "essential patents" that must be made available at a reasonable price?
  - extropy 6y ago
    Generally yes. But you would need to spend 3 years in court to get that to work.
    - exikyut 6y ago
      Follow-on question for the sake of debate: what if you got a bunch of smaller wannabe startups and interests backing a group effort to do exactly this for a pool of things? Would the legal fees scale linearly? :/
Waterluvian 6y ago
Google's involvement in any kind of hardware is already a distraction from their core product line. Making their own chips is a distraction on a distraction. Distraction might not be the right word but I can't conjure up the right one. Hardware is one of the end goals for Apple, for example. For Google, Android hardware is not. It's just there to serve their goal of selling ads.
- qbasic_forever 6y ago
  IMHO those dynamics are changing. Custom chips are becoming table stakes for new products. Look at Apple M1, W1, or Amazaon's Graviton2 chips. All of those are core parts of products and services which would not be possible without the custom silicon. The pool of talent and resources to build these things is extremely small, and there are geopolitical issues putting ever more pressure and scarcity on them (i.e. China pivoting to reduce dependency on Western designed chips and hoovering up as much chip design talent as possible). The TL;DR is amazing new hardware and services need custom silicon, but custom silicon is only getting more difficult and more challenging to build in the near future.
LASR 6y ago
I've heard RF-anything is quite hard to get right. One of the reasons why Intel was dumped for XMM modems is because they were just slower than Qualcomm.
mondoshawan 6y ago
I can't speak to this directly because of numerous reasons, chiefly among them being that I don't get to make those decisions. Standard disclaimer follows: I rejoined in the last two years, what follows are my opinions, these opinions are my own, blah blah. Android has never been about driving the hardware narrative -- it's always been about building a phone with mostly open contributions and driving the start of a wedge to open up the phone industry a bit. It's always been a software answer to a hardware problem, even today. Prior to Android, all we had were closed source low powered feature phones and Blackberries. That being said, building silicon is non trivial work, and building a BLE stack and controller is even more so. Will a solid BLE stack sell phones? Hard to say how it could drive that narrative, realistically, and even harder to say if such a controller could be made cost effectively. Given Android's archetype (software solution to closed hardware), this puts such a project into a much more difficult position politically and financially. I can't see this kind of thing having much in the way of legs in a large corp. That being said, I do think if a startup could challenge this landscape, it is a HUGE opportunity.
- qbasic_forever 6y ago
  Yeah from the Android platform side it would be weird to build chips. For products like the Pixel phone though, that would be a great place to innovate. And realistically, Google needs to get into the custom chip game sooner rather than later... GCE needs to start competing with Amazon's Graviton ARM processors. The sooner you get the expertise and talent to churn out chips (and maybe even a fab or two?), the better. The global shortage for fab usage and chips could kind of force your hand soon.
  - vlovich123 6y ago
    Google doesn't have the volume on its first-party hardware to drive something like this yet & they would never start with BLE chips. Additionally, there's some really good vendors out of China already challenging BCOM & QCOM FWIW, which further complicates the "build it yourself" narrative (look at the Pixel buds which have an AirPods-like experience running a Chinese BLE chip for the buds which other Western vendors weren't able to match). The Android org generally isn't the right org to build hardware, let alone do chip design. Maybe the camera team got closest when I worked there? Source: worked on Pixel Buds @ Google & was one of several engineers responsible for selecting the chip vendor. We got source access to the entire stack/OS except for the microcode & some parts of the stack they hid. I found BES a way better partner to work with than the BCOM/QCOM mess.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cptskippy 6y ago
> Serious question, why doesn't Google build its own bluetooth & BLE chips? There is a lot of overlap between WiFi and Bluetooth & BLE such that you just have a Wireless chip that does both. In fact I think with Bluetooth 4 the file transfer profile just establishes an adhoc WiFi network. You don't have separate Bluetooth and WiFi chips anymore. Furthering that, in the mobile space the Wireless capabilities are usually integrated into the mobile SoC. So you don't even have separate chips for CPU and Wireless. About the only time you see a separate Wireless chip is when a new technology is emerging like 5G and it's usually only an external chip for a generation or two until it can be integrated into the SoC. So, if you were to design your own Bluetooth chip today you would also be designing a WiFi chip and then you'd probably just roll all that into a SoC with a CPU. No small feat.
- mrpippy 6y ago
  > In fact I think with Bluetooth 4 the file transfer profile just establishes an adhoc WiFi network. This was a feature of Bluetooth 3.0, but almost nothing ever used it. I was once at a big BT testing company and asked about it, and they had like one device that could do it (a crazy feature-packed HTC WinMo device I think). And then Bluetooth 4.0 added BLE, and it seems like there hasn't been much development of classic BT since then.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
ay 6y ago
Tangential - in the BLE land nrf52832 and friends are pretty neat, and there is an ongoing work on the rust stack: https://github.com/jonas-schievink/rubble https://github.com/jonas-schievink/rubble I tried it and it can do a few basic things, though it’s in the early stages, apparently.
- parwan98 6y ago
  Nrf52 are great BLE chips, however the full bluetooth spec (classic+BLE) is orders of magnitude more complex...
mcshicks 6y ago
Getting good yield/performance on the radio is non trivial. Aside from having domain experts you have a pretty significant investment in equipment to do the testing. Broadcom and other semis split that cost over many customers.