First look inside iPhone 4 reveals high reuse

SAN JOSE, Calif.--You could call the new Apple iPhone 4 an iPad Nano because it uses at least seven chips from the popular Apple tablet, according to analysts from UBM TechInsights that have done a teardown of the new smartphone. STMicroelectronics won a coveted design win for its MEMS gyro in the handset.

The teardown specialist is preparing a full report on the iPhone 4. UBM TechInsights is a division of United Business Media, the publisher of EE Times.

Like the iPad, iPhone 4 uses Apple's A4 as its applications processor. However it uses a version with twice the memory—512 Mbytes of Samsung Mobile DDR SDRAM. Specifically the part uses the Samsung K4X4G643GB, a package-on-package stack of two 2 Gbit die.

Design reuse is clearly a big focus for Apple these days. For example, the iPhone 4 continues Apple's use of baseband and transceiver chips from Infineon despite a highly competitive market for such chips. The handset also uses the same Dialog power management chip Apple put in the iPad.

A first look at the main logic board for the Apple iPhone 4 Click on image to enlarge.

The iPhone 4 also reuses several other iPad parts including a Broadcom Bluetooth FM radio combo chip (the BCM4329), Broadcom GPS device (the BCM4750) and Cirrus Logic audio codec (the 338S0589). The iPad and iPhone 4 also share in common two memory chips—a Samsung 256 Gbit NAND flash device (the K9TFG08U5M) and a combo device from Numonyx.

"If you are a supply chain guy negotiating for lowest price, you know these chips have millions of iPad sockets and now millions more for the iPhone 4," said Steve Bitton, a senior analyst with UBM TechInsights working on the iPhone 4 teardown.