How is this even possible? I mean I get it’s hard but a 3 inch modem chip? lol
You're kidding right? Management didn't know until late last year?
I call BS.
The area that a chip takes up is the physical size of the part, any passives it needs, and the space to route the traces to connect them all and meet noise/emf specs.
It can take a very long time to figure out if a part is "too big" because it requires iterative design/redesign time by engineers, and it's not knowable before they begin working with the part.
While at those engineering levels you can emulate and foresee all that, sometimes shit simply happens.
It's hard to work around all the patents from Qualcomm etc otherwise you'd get sued.