Contributed by Mandi Gingerich and Jim Morrison
Just when you thought we might be finished with Apple-related teardown updates, here we are once again. We too had hoped to be through with this by now, but alas, there seems to have been a delay in delivery of our new Apple Watch. We’ve heard this is a fairly common...
Contributed by Stacy Wegner, Al Cowsky, Chad Davis, Dick James, Daniel Yang, Ray Fontaine and Jim Morrison
Keep up with major updates to the ongoing teardown blog.
And the winner is….Intel, at least in the iPhone 7 A1778 we have in our lab. The Intel and Apple iPhone 7 rumors have been circulating...
Contributed by Dick James
As usual, within days of the August 19 launch of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7, we had it in pieces and had identified most of the significant components that were inside.
APU and memory
The application processor that drives our phone is the Exynos 8 Octa (Exynos 8890), similar to the Galaxy S7 and...
Contributed by Ray Angers
Speculation about who will acquire analog semiconductor manufacturer Intersil is high in the latest chapter of the 2016 Mergers and Acquisitions story. Reports indicate that Japan’s Renesas, a leader in the automotive IC market, currently has offered US$3B for the Milpitas-based company. While Intersil...
Contributed by Daniel Yang, Mandi Gingerich and Phil Gamache
In today’s smartphones, a touch screen has become a must-have function. To implement this function, smartphone makers usually have to use two separate silicon components to fulfill both the touch function and the display driving function, a touch screen controller (...
Contributed by Dick James
Soitec Bounces Back, Makes Gains in Mobile Phones, AutomotiveThe week of July 11 was the week for the annual pilgrimage down to the Semicon West show, though it’s becoming less of a show these days than a gathering place for the industry, with multiple conferences in parallel, hence the motto for the event...
Contributed by Miranda Lim
Last year we looked at the Force Touch technology on the Apple Watch including its construction and its capacitive sensing approach. Later in the year, Apple introduced 3D Touch on iPhone 6s and we have performed a similar analysis (report available soon in the Chipworks Store, please contact us). Since...
Contributed by: Sinjin Dixon-Warren
MEMS microphones appear in smartphone and tablet products from all the major suppliers, including in Apple and Samsung products. According to IHS, Apple is a major driver for MEMS microphone product growth. The iPhone 6, for example, contains three MEMS microphones, while the iPhone 6s contains four....
Contributed by Mandi Gingerich
In June, Samsung released a new, AT&T exclusive version of its flagship Galaxy S7 smartphone, the Galaxy S7 active. This is the latest in a line of outdoors-y Galaxy S active devices, earning the title “toughest Galaxy device ever” and boasting a shatter-resistant screen, an IP68 water-...
Contributed by Mike Spence and Martin Bijman
It feels like the intellectual property (IP) industry is being inundated with new patent tools. These tools generally sit on top of the same corpus of data – patent and trademark filings from the international Patent and Trademark Offices (PTOs). The USPTO corpus has...
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