Last week, we were fortunate enough to receive a Galaxy S7 Edge G935T based on the Snapdragon 820 chipset, and this week we get our first look into the Exynos variant, the Galaxy S7 G930FD. We like to look at all major phone releases across their many different models, as we know that there are differences in who wins what sockets in the...


Contributed by Jim Morrison, Ray Fontaine, Dick James and Daniel Yang
The following teardown blog contains some of our initial findings. For more in depth information on these topics and more, download the full Galaxy S7 edge teardown report.
Jump to the Rear-Facing Camera...

Contributed by Owen Wetherow
We tore down the Microsoft Band II back in November, but we think it deserves a second look. It has a lot of great silicon inside.
The Band II website gave us a beautifully animated exploded view of the fitness band.
http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/cat/All-Microsoft-Band/categoryID....

Contributed by St.J. Dixon-Warren
One of the tedious tasks in transporting even the newest light-weight laptop is also needing to lug the “brick” charger along with it. In the last couple of years, we have seen attempts to market small-format, light-weight chargers that fit easily into a briefcase or pocket. The Avogy Zolt is...

Contributed by: B. Drevniok - Chipworks, O. Amster - Prime Nano Inc. and St. J. Dixon-Warren - Chipworks
Scanning microwave impedance microscopy (sMIM) is a new scanning probe microscopy (SPM) technique that replaces traditional scanning capacitance microscopy (SCM). Like SCM, the new sMIM technique reveals information on the...

Contributed by Dick James
It’s the time in the media world that we see a frenzy of predictions for the coming year. They are mostly business or tech trends, so I figured I might as well chip in (har! har!), and give a more detailed idea of what new semiconductor products we look forward to this year, now that we are in 2016.
...

Last month we purchased an iPad Pro and an Apple pencil to understand what devices were being used by Apple in this new tablet and stylus solution. This story is not about the iPad Pro, but about the Apple Pencil.
With a physical size of 176 mm long x 9mm in diameter and weighing about 1 gram, we found 15 semiconductor devices...

By John Sullivan and Ray Angers
During the holiday season, we at Chipworks sometimes divert our attention from leading-edge microelectronic technologies to more festive themes. This year we focused our patent analytics capabilities on Christmas and were surprised to find a wealth of patents tied to the holidays.
A...

Contributed by Dick James
On the Monday afternoon at IEDM the key paper for me was the Intel/Micron talk on their 3D-NAND flash part (paper 3.3), which is currently sampling to customers. Samsung put their V-NAND flash on the market last year, but that uses charge-trap technology, whereas the Intel/Micron device has adapted conventional...

Contributed by Dick James
Recently we got our hands on a Sony MP-CL1 mobile projector, or as they are more commonly known these days, a pico-projector. It’s a pretty compact device being a tad under 6” long, a tad over 3” wide, and a tad over ½” thick (145 x 77 x 13 mm), and weighs in at 210 gm (~7.4 oz.),...