Industry Expert Blogs

SIM cards have been around for several decades, they have been instrumental is setting up mobile communication, but the ongoing expansion of IoT applications leads to reaching their limits as changing to a new SIM card every time a mobile object goes through a border or needs to be upgraded, is, to say the least, impractical. To answer this evolution of needs, the industry has developed the eSIM (or embedded SIM): a SIM chip embedded into an object or a consumer handset, and that can be remotely managed and updated.

But needs for optimization, especially in the IoT field, are arising. Again, the industry has a solution: the iSIM (or integrated SIM), which consists in moving SIM functions to a dedicated silicon area inside the System-on-Chip (SoC) including the application processor and/or the cellular modem. This evolution is driven by economy and flexibility considerations: moving the SIM functionalities onto another processor allows to get rid of an additional processor and to reduce the silicon surface, thus leading to a significant cost reduction.

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