Intel is sued for its sofia chips after several mobile phones catch fire

Several years ago, when Intel was still trying to break into the smartphone market, the company announced a strange alliance. Not being able to build an integrated smartphone modem on its own chip at the time, the company decided to team up with TSMC, which was in charge of manufacturing the modems.

Intel is sued for its SoFIA chips, which apparently overheated and caused the explosion of several smartphones

This allowed Intel to launch a SoC, called SoFIA, capable of competing in low and mid-range markets. However, recently a Brazilian device maker by the name of Qbex has filed a lawsuit against Intel alleging that several flaws in the design of SoFIA chips have caused spontaneous power-up and overheating of numerous smartphones.

QBEX claims that some components of the SoFIA chips were defective from the outset, and that Intel was aware of these defects, but had no intention of correcting them.

Devices based on the SoFIA processor were sold mainly in emerging markets, and had a performance similar to that of mobiles with Atom processors, with clock frequencies between 1 GHz and 1.2 GHz.

According to Qbex, Intel approached him to work together in January 2015 under an agreement whereby Qbex's smartphone, which bore the Intel Inside brand, would use components created as part of the Rockchip agreement (a Chinese manufacturer with whom Intel had previously closed deals to bring SoFIA-based devices to market.)

The problems came soon after for QBEX, when customers began to return dozens of defective smartphones, in addition to receiving thousands of complaints. After a brief investigation, Qbex engineers identified some flaws in the SoFIA microprocessor, "which caused the smartphones to overheat, which could lead them to catch fire or even explode."

An Intel spokesperson responded to this demand by saying the following:

"We are thoroughly investigating the claims in the lawsuit. However, we have no evidence to suggest that the overheating issues QBEX is pointing to were caused by our product. ”