Chipworks

We can hear it now – the “Intel Inside” clarion call, long associated with the brand. Da doo da doooo (sound onomatopoeia trademark Intel).

Xolo is leveraging the good Intel name to help market this phone by including the Intel branding on both the box and phone (we don’t know for sure, but it seems likely that Intel supports this by providing marketing $$$).

It is indeed exciting times for those who follow the progress of the smartphone. Intel has brought their long standing leadership in the desktop and server microprocessor market to the applications processor market with the first seen design win in the Lava X900.

In a market where the ARM vendors have been successful in creating brand differentiation by adding unique and powerful features to their chips (such as NVIDIA’s focus on gaming or Qualcomm’s focus on chipset and overall system and network performance), will “Intel Inside” be a compelling message for buyers in this space?

Intel touts being able to leverage their significant lead in process technology to deliver the power savings, while their architecture can deliver the goods in performance. From analyzing their technology, over the last few years in particular, we tend to agree that they have a good fighting chance.

(marketing shot at right from Lava’s website)

With the back off, we were met with a clean looking interior that in some ways reminded us of Apple devices. What we mean by this is that the interior that nobody ever sees is clean and uncluttered, and almost . . . designed. It was as though they wanted to make sure the phone was wearing clean underwear for when it’s outer clothes were removed during the teardown treatment. Once the circuit board was exposed, we see a large shield covering much of the silicon, but in a somewhat organized way. Even the battery sported a reasonably clean look in delivering its 3.7 V 5.4 Wh performance.

The majority of the functional silicon sits at the bottom of the board under the shielded portion. The images at the right are enlargeable for those who wish to navigate the device layout in more detail. Below, you will see zoomed-in shots of specific devices.

If you were thinking that Intel’s main strength is in their processing technology, then you are not considering that Intel has taken important steps in building chipset solutions. They don’t market them with the same strength of, say a Qualcomm, but the potential is there to deliver a fairly complete phone solution. We see what we believe to be the fruits of this in the Lava Xolo, with an Intel-branded baseband processor (9811) as well as a couple of devices from Infineon (with nondescript package markings 1.3 and 15A). Not really a well-defined chipset so to speak, but on its way to becoming one.

Sitting right under the Elpida DRAM die in a typical PoP fashion is the Intel Q152C489 – aka Medfield. This is the Intel Atom Z 2460, fabbed in their 32 nm SoC process, running at 1.6 Ghz. Die markings at right show the Penwell 2009 code. The package markings indicate (we believe) a manufacture date of “week 52, 2011″, which means that they were shipping these chips to manufacturers last year (just in time for CES!).

This chip features an Intel graphics core and Intel Burst Performance technology, so when you are going for that kill shot in the latest smartphone game, you don’t need to worry about stuttering. It also features, more practically, 1080p video capabilities and includes on-board image processing for the 8 Mp camera phone. We’re including Intel’s block layout diagram for your interest, but physical die block dimensions are reserved for those ordering Functional Analysis Reports.

This is not a true apples-to-apples comparison, but this Penwell 32 nm die measures 7.97 mm x 7.96 mm versus the Tegra 3 40 nm we looked at, measuring 9.58 mm x 8.55 mm, or the more recent Qualcomm MSM8960 measuring 9.9 mm x 8.9 mm.

So, with this latest chip, we see three significant advantages for Intel in entering this market:

1) Intel co-marketing dollars likely supplied to help companies using their chips

2) The makings of an Intel chipset

3) A powerful processor with a competitive die size that is among the top performing, according to web reviews

You don’t get a lot of information from a top metal die photo, but for those interested, we have made one free in the Chipworks Store (registration required).

As we are used to seeing from the world’s largest analog company, we have a few critical design wins in this phone, including the Texas Instruments WL1283C WiLink 7.0 chip delivering WLAN, GPS, Bluetooth (and BLe), AND, and FM. We found it curious to have a SiRF chip and a WiLink 7.0 in here, so it seems that not all the functionality of the WL1283 are being employed. For those interested, we recorded a video of some of the interesting circuits in the Bluetooth block.

Also found:

- Texas Instruments 95031B3 power management IC
- Texas Instruments 24316DSG charge control and protection IC
- Texas Instruments TPS61161 LED driver

Carrying the tradition of a board layout that is organized and almost designed for a public teardown, we have a grouping of inertial sensors including:

- InvenSense gyroscope (MPU3050)

- Bosch accelerometer (package markings C3H)

- Honeywell compass (L883)

Rounding out the sensing capabilities, we find the SiRF GSD-4T 9600 GPS chip.

For near-field communications, the phone employs the market leading NXP PN544 chip.  This chip contains the necessary rf and processor capabilities to receive the signals and handle the security encryption. Now that ARM is moving encryption on board the applications processor, the market for this type of device may be limited to just the NFC radio only.

The ubiquitous (and top performing) Atmel MXT224 provides the touch screen control.

We did note a good set of design wins for RF Micro Devices, in addition to some Murata devices in the AFE:

- RF Micro Devices RF6261 RF amplifier

- RF Micro Devices 6561 power management IC

- RF Micro Devices RF6590 power management IC

And finally, the 16 GB flash memory is courtesy of the Toshiba THGBM4G7D2GBAIE, while the 8 Gb lower power DRAM is provided by the Elpida B806482PB – the latter being a device we have seen in quite a few smartphones and tablets.

For those tracking the higher volume design wins (for example those licensing IP) we’ll delve into a little more detail on the front end. The device labeled “1CR 20, 1.3” is an Infineon SP5T / SP3T (that we have seen before in the Samsung S II i9100) main antenna switch with one of its pins connected directly to the phone’s main antenna and feeding into the Murata filter banks and the Infineon PMB5712 RF transceiver. The device marked “1SA 1130” is a diversity switch given that the phone has a clearly labeled diversity antenna attached to the external case. The 15A is an Infineon Single Pole 5 Throw (SP5T) antenna switch also found in the Apple iPhone 4S.

For those more casually interested in teardowns, first a bit of back story on graphics cards. If you don’t pay much attention to this type of technology, these things are typically used by high-end gamers who consider speed and quality to be a visceral and competitive advantage when gaming. They take glory in the fact that they can now play games like Metro 2033 at 85 frames-per-second (fps) when before they were limited to 78 fps. By way of comparison, many games on a PlayStation 3 have “de-tuned” graphics quality which are locked to 30 fps.

If you have been gaming on an iPad2, then this world, where products come packaged in a box featuring a picture of some kind of death knight mounted on a horse against a background of orange lightning bolts, might be weird and scary. There is no “less is more” mentality among the hard core.  But the innovation is interesting too – so read on.

Silicon Laboratories SL16010DC clock generator

CHiL Semiconductor power management controller

Fairchild NC7SZ74K8X MOSFET

Fairchild FDMC8200 N-channel FET

OnSemiconductor MC74VHCT125H MOSFET

Coiltronics 1007R3-R15 inductors (6)

Programmable Microelectronics Corp Pm25LD010 serial flash memory

At the right we are showing the full die. Die size indicates that it is fabbed in Hynix’ 44-nm process, and it has the usual square block-layout format and double row of bond pads typical of a graphics DRAM, to give the higher data rates. If you are a DRAM manufacturer then you may want the full resolution version available for free here in the Chipworks Store (but you do need to go through a check out process).

Data rates are critical in a graphics board like this, so we have also shown a board image adjusted to show the tracks between the Radeon GPU and the memory chips; you can see the various routes laid out to keep the parasitic values equivalent for each separate chip so that they perform equally.

Using the latest 28 nm technology lets AMD squeeze 2084 shaders, organized in 32 compute units, on to the die, for a total of 4.3 billion transistors in 365 sq. mm. The chip is clocked at 925 MHz, giving a theoretical performance of ~3.8 TFLOPS, compared with ~2.7 of the previous generation Radeon 6970.