Blogs

Posted: December 23, 2015 A lot of semiconductor content in something so small! Last month we purchased an iPad Pro and an Apple pencil to understand what devices were being used by Apple in this new tablet and stylus solution. This story is not about the iPad Pro, but about the Apple Pencil. With a

Posted: October 23, 2015 Contributing Authors: Ray Angers Microsemi Corp. (Aliso Viejo, California) trumped Skyworks’ (Woburn, Massachusetts) $2 billion bid for PMC-Sierra this week with their offer of $11.50 per share, or about $2.2 billion. Sunnyvale, California based PMC-Sierra provides

Posted: September 25, 2015 Contributing Authors: Dick James, Daniel Yang, Stacy Wegner, Chad Davis & Albert Cowsky It’s now a yearly ritual - go line up and get the new iPhone! This year Apple did multi-country launches, and allowed pre-orders to be picked up from the store, so no more driving down

Posted: August 21, 2015 Well, that happened. We found ourself doing not ONE, but two, quick turn teardowns on the same day - the OnePlus 2 and the Samsung Galaxy Note 5. We couldn’t have done it without the full support of our teams, both here in the US and across the Atlantic in Europe, so a big

Posted: August 21, 2015 A Galaxy More Like the S6 than the Note 4 In this galaxy not that long ago, Samsung released what could arguably be the first device to put ‘phablet’ in all of our vocabularies, the Galaxy Note. Fast forward to their recent announcement, Samsung boasted how they knew (“way”)

Posted: April 24, 2015 Contributing Authors: Jim Morrison. Daniel Yang and Chad Davis Apple Delivers a Wearable in Total Apple Fashion A few days ago, Apple sent us our tracking number indicating that our shipment would arrive today, Friday, April 24th. We were pleasantly surprised to be a recipient

Posted: April 2, 2015 Contributing Authors: Dick James and Daniel Yang Samsung Galaxy S6 Teardown The much anticipated Samsung Galaxy S6 has made an early appearance in our teardown labs this morning – thanks to the diligent skills of our trusted logistics guru. We got our hands on the 4G+ version,

Posted: February 9, 2015 Contributing Authors: Martin Bijman On Feb 2, Intel announced it will purchase “Internet of Things” (IoT) chip company Lantiq. According to Intel, this will enhance connection experiences in the home, by extending its home gateway business with Lantiq product lineup of

Posted: December 24, 2014 Contributing Authors: Martin Bijman On December 23, 2014, RPX purchased the remaining assets of Rockstar for $900M.[1] RPX describes in their release that of the 6,000 assets in the initial Rockstar $4.5B purchase of Nortel assets in July 2011, about 2,000 had been

Posted: September 9, 2014 Contributing Authors: C. Young, D. Yang, R. Fontaine, J. Morrison, D. James, Chad Davis and Albert Cowsky Inside the Apple iPhone 6 The iPhone 6 may be the most anticipated Apple handset since the original iPhone, and with good reason. In addition to the cultural impact

Posted: July 25, 2014 Amazon Fire Phone Teardown Preliminary Teardown analysis suggests that Amazon’s $649.00 USD (Amazon.com) phone costs $209.00 USD to build. Qualcomm is the primary providers of many of the key integrated circuits and both Invensense and OmniVision are noted for their role in

Posted: July 1, 2014 Galaxy S5 Mini Processor Package-on-Package Samsung Brings Shannon into the Galaxy S5 Mini Samsung brings their Shannon solution into the Galaxy S5 Mini, and by our observations this model already has FCC approval. The SM-G800F was first released in Russia, but with the FCC