Teardown of the KIN TWO CDMA Phone from Microsoft and Sharp

The KIN TWO, a Microsoft powered smart phone, is somewhat of a first for NVIDIA and Microsoft. Sure both companies have success in mobile technologies, but this phone is being uniquely positioned as Microsoft’s mobile technology for social networking. Meanwhile over at NVIDIA, this is a major win for its applications processor technology. The phone is manufactured by Sharp for Verizon Wireless.

	First, the box deserves a mention. Hey, it’s nice!

	Inside the BoxThe smart phone uses a well established combination of slide out keyboard and touch screen. The packaging is stylish, and we liked the tactile feel of the keyboard. But our teardowns are about the silicon, so let’s go inside.Other features that we liked:1) The image sensor is 8 Mp, and it’s one of the first camera phones to feature 720p HD video2) 256 MB of RAM and 8 GBIT of flash memory

	Inside the KIN TWO PhoneNot much to see when taking the back off. A good look at the image sensor package, but the rest is covered up.

(click to enlarge)	The BoardThe “front” of the board contains the majority of the chips. Highlights here include:1) Avago ACFM-7103 PCS/Cellular/GPS Quintplexer2) Avago ACPM-7353 CDMA Power Amplifier3) Qualcomm QSC6085 CDMA Processor 4) Texas Instruments WL1271A Wireless LAN/Bluetooth/FM Radio (built at 65 nm) 5) Sony IMX046 8 Mp Image Sensor 6) Texas Instruments TPS658600 Power Management for Li-Ion / Li-Pol Battery 7) Wolfson WM8903L Stereo Codec That big memory chip from Numonyx. It is an obvious package-on-package, so it will be coming off later.

(click to enlarge)	On the BackIn addition to the keyboard, we see a Samsung KLM8G4DE00 8 Gbit NAND flash and an STMicroelectronics LIS331-DL inertial sensor – ST continues to get a lot of design wins for its MEMS group and we have documented ST’s inertial sensor success in Micronews.

(click to enlarge)	The Touch Screen ControllerThe white-hot touch screen controller market makes every device we get interesting. Rarely do we see duplicate part numbers, as the vendors are continually evolving their product lines. In this case, the big winner is Synaptics with its Clearpad technology and device marked as the T1021A.

	The Image SensorThe image sensor is one of the latest generation from Sony. Sony has been a market leader in innovation for these camera phones by leading the way in pixel shrink and techniques to improve light collection at the pixel. This particular device, the IMX046, features a five metal process at 90 nm and the latest 1.4 µm pixel size.This is an interesting coup based on the online specifications, since we were expecting to see an OmniVision design win.

(click to enlarge)	Where’s the NVIDIA Tegra?NVIDIA has highly touted this design win – but it is nowhere to be seen. Do we have an interesting story here? The answer is “yes,” but only if you are into chip-on-chip packaging. The processor and memory stack is an impressive four dies mounted together in two packages.Typical of what we are seeing these days, Sharp has elected to go with a package-on-package to save real estate, and to improve performance by keeping the memory and processor close together. The x-ray didn’t reveal much, so we dropped the packages into acid and took a look at the die.The top package markings are Intel’s but represent Numonyx – the joint venture between Intel and STMicroelectronics that is now part of Micron (confused?) and inside . . .

	. . . are ST die markings. We have seen this before with Numonyx memory.

	Also inside the memory package, we found two Hynix DRAM dies.This impressive, and very thin, little stack is the heart of the processor running the software.

(click to enlarge)	Underneath the Numonyx MemoryPulling off the top package, we see the expected NVIDIA Tegra APX2600. NVIDIA promotes quite a few design wins, but this is the first that we have publically documented.Interestingly, we find Korean package markings. Given that NVIDIA has traditionally used TSMC for fabrication, we expect that the device was packaged in Korea. However, we’ll be looking at the process technology to determine some of the process details and confirm where the device is made.

(click to enlarge)	What is the Little Chip Hanging off the Processor?We also decided to depot a couple of the other devices close to the processor core. The one that “hung” off the edge of the processor intrigued us. It had package markings of 2140 062C, and turned out to be a design win for SMSC with a USB3321 transceiver. The die photo only reveals the redistribution layer but die markings were clear enough. It is interesting to see USB being used as a method of communication on the board, connecting chips-to-chips and not just for device-to-device communication. In this case USB is being used to connect the applications and communications processors together. A trend expected to grow.This device is promoted as the industry’s smallest USB 2.0 transceiver, and we can confirm that it is less than 4 mm².