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Intel's Medfield reference Android smartphone

Several years ago, back when Intel was nonetheless trying to intermission into the smartphone market, the company appear a highly unusual partnership. Because Intel couldn't build a smartphone modem integrated on-die on its own silicon at that time, the visitor decided to partner with TSMC, which handled its modem manufacturing. This immune Intel to bring an SoC to market that could compete in the budget and mainstream smartphone markets of the fourth dimension with the on-fleck modem that was critical to competing in that space. The chip, dubbed SoFIA, had a multi-year roadmap and Intel also inked deals with the Chinese manufacturer Rockchip to bring devices out for the mainland Chinese marketplace every bit well.

Intel SoFIA

A slide from 2022, showing where SoFIA fit in Intel's roadmaps at the time.

A new complaint filed confronting Intel and emailed to ExtremeTech by smartphone and device manufacturer Qbex, a Brazilian company, alleges that defects in the SoFIA blueprint led to a number of smartphone fires and thousands of complaints against the company. QBEX alleges that the SoFIA parts were defective from the outset, that Intel was aware of the defects, and that the company has taken fiddling to no action to fix the problem.

SoFIA devices were by and large a play for markets outside the United states, and the CPUs themselves were fairly modest, even compared with other Cantlet processors. Clock speeds were in the 1GHz – ane.2GHz range, with both dual-core and quad-core parts available on the market place. Of the various SoFIA chips, only the Rockchip models are listed as having shipped on Intel's Ark website:

RockChips

A sample of the Rockchip SKUs listed at Ark.Intel.com

According to Qbex, Intel approached information technology near working together on a articulation smartphone in January 2022. As part of that agreement, Qbex's smartphone — which carried Intel Inside branding — would use parts built as part of the Rockchip agreement. Nosotros've wondered in the by almost which smartphones had fielded the Rockchip design and Qbex just filled in that part of the puzzle.

Qbex really praises Intel'south collaboration and representation of the ongoing piece of work relationship between Qbex, Intel, and the various Chinese semiconductor manufacturers that provided boosted components for the device, writing "For all practical purposes, the ODMs [Original Device Manufacturers] functioned every bit an extension of Intel, which is exactly what Ms. Souza and other executives of Intel had represented." Qbex sold 235,074 Intel smartphones from Oct 2022 to Dec 2022. While that'south small potatoes compared with Samsung or Apple, the visitor considered these sales figures to exist quite skillful "for a in one case local electronics company."

Alleged defects

The filing and so alleges that this success was a "curse in disguise for Qbex" considering "Intel's cardinal microprocessor and/or mobile system had a blueprint defect that caused the devices to overheat and fifty-fifty explode." Qbex claims that Intel was aware of these defects by October of 2022, before the Qbex phone had gone on sale, merely did not communicate this data, despite sharing information technology with the ODMs that were handling actual device manufacturing.

What follows reads a little like the back-and-forth between the EPA and Volkswagen, at least from Qbex'due south bespeak of view. First, Intel said that the temperature readings were a footling high, but normal for the product. And so it promised a software update to bring temperatures downwardly. All the while, complaints and returns were escalating throughout 2022 — 401 devices were returned in April, 915 in May, and i,446 in June. Fifty-fifty after Intel appear it would cancel SoFIA, it plainly promised Qbex it would all the same release a software update to repair the handsets and bring operating temperatures down.

Just that didn't happen, and client returns skyrocketed by mid-2016. In July, Qbex received 9,090 complaints or returned devices, with 5,962 in August. Qbex claims that its own internal measurements identified a defect in the SoFIA microprocessor itself that "caused the smartphones to overheat, catch burn, and sometimes explode." The exact nature of this flaw is not identified, but since the device was built past ODMs of Intel's choosing and according to Intel'southward specification, the problem could lie almost anywhere within the hardware. Presumably it isn't a conventional battery problem, or the Qbex case would accept stated that, specifically, just this is not sure.

Qbex is accusing Intel of selling known-lacking trade and full general alienation of contract.

Update:We reached out to Intel regarding these allegations. A company spokesperson told ExtremeTech that: "Nosotros are reviewing the allegations in the complaint and we will investigate them thoroughly. Still, we take no prove to propose that the overheating issues QBEX alleges were caused by our product."