A short year ago, 5G platforms, from radios to cloud infrastructure, were providing a golden opportunity for chip suppliers. A wave of deployments would create demand for sophisticated radio/antennas with Massive MIMO arrays; for high performance infrastructure to support virtualized base stations, based on standard processors but packed with accelerators; and of course for all those new smartphones and other devices. The growth potential remains, of course, even if some deployments will be slowed down by the pandemic crisis. But there are several daunting new barriers for chip companies which aim to exploit the 5G opportunity. The two most important are down to global economic or political trends rather than any technology issues. One is the proposed acquisition of ARM…