iPhone’s Inside Beneficiaries

The first few attempts at understanding the guts of the iPhone have started emerging. Here are 2 pieces that take a crack at the topic from EETimes and TechOnline.

Key points on the iPhone’s components are below:

* A Samsung chip, which is a three stacked die package containing an ARM processor (S5L8900) and two 512 Mbit Mobile DDR SDRAM dice.
* A Broadcom part (BCM5973) which probably provides the I/O controller used for the video interface to the touch screen.
* 2 Infineon parts, the PMB8876 S-Gold 2 multimedia engine with EDGE functionality provides the iPhone’s baseband, and the second Infineon part appears to be the GSM RF transceiver.
* A National Semiconductor 24-bit RGB display interface serializer.
* Possibly, a Texas Instruments power-management device, although there is differing opinion about who provides the power management unit. Could also be National Semiconductor. Whichever company provided it, it must have some very advanced engineering, to be able to deliver the level of battery life that the iPhone is claiming.
* Amperex Technology Limited supplied the Li-Poly battery [possibly multi-sourced, though.]
* STMicro provides the LIS302 accelerometer.
* Micron got the 2-megapixel CMOS imager win.
* Samsung’s 65-nm 8-Gbyte MLC NAND flash (K9MCG08U5M) was used in the iPhone as one of the main storage devices for songs, pictures and videos. [iPod repeat component.]
* Marvell has a wireless connectivity device (88W8686 is a 90-nm WLAN part).
* Balda, a German company, scored the design win with the touch screen.
* The iPhone also implements Intel wireless flash with 32 Mbytes of NOR coupled with 16 Mbytes of SRAM for code execution.

We will look at the iPhone’s component eco-system in further detail shortly. Over the weekend, 0.5 Million iPhone units have already moved. This means, the momentum is superb, and Apple’s target of selling 10 Million units before the end of the year may well be on target. We will review the beneficiaries in the days to follow.

Acc. to Austin-based Portelligent, the cost of components for Apple is only $220. The most expensive part is the touch screen by Balda. The estimated cost of the screen is around $60. The production cost of the much less popular 4 GB version of the iPhone is $200. Apple, therefore, has engineered tremendous margins into the product, very unlike the rest of the cellular handset business!