An Insight into the Amazing iPhone & Few Facts about it

Apple’s iPhone is a powerful and the most buzzed thing in the telecom industry that integrates technologies from Infineon, Samsung, Broadcom, Intel, Linear Technologies, STMicroelectronics, Triqiunt, NXP Semiconductors, Texas Instruments, Marvell and many more. It is a global effect of over 10,000 people from over 30 countries and 3 continents. So lets have an insight tour of this amazing product from apple.

The iPhone basically have five elements:

1. Display glass
2. LCD
3. Main logic board
4. Battery
5. Back Panel

Touch-Screen & Display in iPhone:

• Its large 3.5” multi-touch screen responds to both touch points and their movements (like spreading fingers to zoom in or pinching in to zoom out) simultaneously.
• The screen has two main parts – the glass and the digitizer/LCD.
• The glass and the LCD are separate in 3G.
• Touch screen comes form Sharp and Sanyo Epson.
• Broadcom’s BCM5974 chip is used as touch controller and Texas Instruments provides the line driver. National Semiconductors LM2512AA provides display interface.

Processor & Memory in iPhone:

• Samsung provides the DDR SDRAM and the main processor (S3C6400 Based on ARM1176 Core)
• S3C6400 is a 16/32-bit RISC micro processor designed to provide cost-effective, low-power and high-performance application solution for mobile phones
• The main memory comes in 8 GB and 16 GB NAND Flash form Toshiba.
• SST’s Chip provides 1MB Serial Flash.

Power Management in iPhone:

• Infineon’s SMARTi Power management IC SMP3i 6820 is optimized to support modem and data card applications.
• System-level power is controlled and managed through NXP chip
• Triquint provides three power amplifiers, each working on different frequencies and providing highly integrated linear amplifier, duplexer and coupler
• For communications function Skyworks SKY77340 provides power amplification in quad-band GSM/EDGE

Battery:

• Infineon provides solution for as many as four key design aspects.
• Other than the power management IC, it provides UMTS Transreceiver, Baseband processor and GPS Receiver.

GPS:

• The inbuilt GPS capability is provided by Infineon’s PMB2525 Hammerhead II GPS that is integrated with assisted GPS (A-GPS)
• It provides low-noise RF Front and multipath mitigation, which helps in reducing errors in urban areas

Accelerometer:

• Changing the orientation form landscape to portrait and vice versa is possible because of STMicroelectronic’s LIS331 DL Accelerometer.
• Use of this chip has given platform to many application developers for innovation in gaming, photography, etc.

Audio:

• Wolfson WM6180C is the audio codec that replaces the original WM8758
• Audio Formats supported by iPhone 3G are AAC, Protected AAC, MP3, MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 2, 3 and 4), Apple Lossless, AIFF and WAV

Wireless Capability:

• The two chips at the back of the main board are Marvell’s single-chip 88W8686 offering Wi-Fi and CSR Bluecore6-ROM.

Camera:

• iPhone 3G comes with a 2-megapixel camera and the iPhone 3GS comes with 3-megapixel camera which is capable of VGA Video recording.

(Thanks to Zion Technology, Delhi, India, Where iPhone 2G and 3G were disassembled. And other firms like Insights, Technoline and ifixit cracked the mystery of most of the chips used in the iPhone)

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[Editor Note: This is the first guest post submitted by Zubin J Rathod, A Civil Engineering Student, Interested In Ethical Hacking.
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