LONDON — European suppliers scored big wins in the 3G version of Apple's iPhone according to the first teardowns from Portelligent and Semiconductor Insights, as well as sister website TechInsights.
The biggest winner is probably Infineon Technologies AG (Munich, Germany). As predicted it is supplying the 3G UMTS transceiver, suspected to be the PMB 6952, as well as the baseband processor, which is in practice a two-chip module in a single package. The first chip is the X-Gold 208 (PMB 8877), which caters to GSM/GPRS/EDGE waveforms. The second chip is marked the PMB 8802 and is suspected to be the WCDMA/HSDPA accelerator for 3G.
There is still some debate as to whether this combo package with Apple markings may in fact be Infineon's XGold 608 (PMB 8878).
"Infineon clearly made their mark on this board with four key design wins," said Allan Yogasingam, a TechOnline technology analyst.
The German chip group is also the major supplier of the other significant differentiator from the first generation iPhone. Its PMB 2525 Hammerhead II is supplying the built in GPS capability. "In the old one [original iPhone], GPS was software enabled and was accurate to within blocks," said Quirk. "This time it's accurate to within meters."
The Hammerhead II integrates an assisted-GPS (A-GPS) baseband processor with a low-noise GPS RF front end and multi-path mitigation to avoid large errors in urban environments.
Many components remain the same. An ARM-11 (Cambridge, England) based part from Samsung is still the iPhone's main processor, while Wolfson Microelectronics (Edinburgh, Scotland) again provides audio through its own audio codec hardware, this time the WM6180C audio codec, which replaces the WM8758 used on the original iPhone.
The baseband's support memory comes courtesy of Numonyx, the Intel/STMicroelectronics spin-off. It includes 16 Mbytes of NOR flash and 8 Mbytes of pseudo-SRAM (PF38F3050M0Y0CE).
STMicroelectronics is also supplying the accelerometer, the LIS331 DL, while on the back of the main board is a BlueCore6-ROM Bluetooth chip from CSR (Cambridge, England), which surprised the analysts, all of whom were expecting to see the same BlueCore4 device used in the original iPhone.
Power management is also provided by European suppliers: the communications portion of the device is handled by Infineon's SMARTi Power 3i, while system-level power control and management is handled by an NXP Semiconductors (Eindhoven, the Netherlands) part, thought to be the PCF50633, as is the original iPhone.
The full teardown indicates the full list of semiconductor suppliers, which includes Toshiba (NAND flash); Triquint with three PA chips; Texas Instruments' touch screen line driver and a touch screen controller from Broadcom; serial flash from SST; quad-band GSM-EDGE amplifier module from Skyworks; display interface from National Semiconductor; and battery charger plus USB power controller from Linear Technology.
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