Only a few years ago, Wireless Watch was taking only a limited interest in the semiconductor industry. In the mobile world, the networks remained dominated by proprietary chips designed by the major vendors so the major interest in covering the merchant chip industry focused on devices. Even there, significant change was rare as Qualcomm hung onto its domination of sales and intellectual property in the handset system-on-chip over successive generations, seeing off challenges from Intel, Broadcom and many others. Now the mobile semiconductor landscape is very different and coverage of its major players is fundamental to understanding the main drivers of the 5G era. There are many reasons for this, but three are particularly foundational, and play a central role…