Apple Watch Series 3 Teardown Posted: September 13, 2017, Updated October 17, 2017 Contributing Authors: Daniel Yang, Stacy Wegner We have completed the Apple Watch Series 3 teardown. We were especially interested in its cellular functionality, and whether the LTE chipset supplier is Qualcomm or

Apple iPhone 8 Plus Teardown Posted: September 10, 2017, Updated: October 11, 2017 Contributing Authors: Daniel Yang, Stacy Wegner, Ray Fontaine A11 Bionic Application Processor Applications Processor The iPhone 8 Plus A1897 model we examined initially is confirmed to contain the A11 Bionic AP with

Posted: July 24, 2017 Contributing Authors: Ray Fontaine The third topic addressed in the IISW 2017 paper was an overview of the trends we’re seeing in pixel isolation structures. These structures are critical to the performance of 1.0 µm to 1.4 µm generation pixels in smartphone cameras. Going

Posted: June 21, 2017 Contributing Authors: Ray Fontaine At the time of the IISW paper submission deadline in April, we hadn’t yet received the Sony Xperia XZs with 3-layer stacked Motion Eye camera. The technology development had been announced at ISSCC 2017, and we did get results in time for the

Posted: June 14, 2017 Contributing Authors: Jeongdong Choe, Senior Technical Fellow Samsung has begun to mass-produce their first 10 nm-class DRAM products, and we’ve taken this opportunity to analyze and compare it to the previous generations of 25 nm and 20 nm DRAM products. During our analysis

Posted: June 13, 2017 Contributing Authors: Ray Fontaine This year’s IISW marked the 10th anniversary of this biennial conference and corresponded to the 10th anniversary of TechInsights’ presence at the workshop. Don Scansen attended in 2007, under the Semiconductor Insights banner, and gave a

Posted: June 07, 2017 Contributing Authors: Jeongdong Choe, Senior Technical Fellow Figure 1. A comparison of memory density TechInsights has continued to dig into the process, cell structure and materials analysis of the Intel OptaneTM XPoint memory. We discovered that the Intel Optane TM XPoint

Posted: June 05, 2017 Contributing Authors: Jeongdong Choe, Senior Technical Fellow Die Photo SK hynix successively developed their 2nd generation 21 nm DRAM technology last year. Low yield and reliability issues on 21 nm 1st generation, means their new 2nd generation 21 nm DRAM cell technology has

Posted: May 18, 2017 Contributing Authors: Jeongdong Choe, Senior Technical Fellow Figure 1: Xpoint Memory Package Figure 2: Xpoint Memory Die (16 GB) TechInsights recently acquired and tore down an Intel OptaneTM M.2 80mm 16GB PCIe 3.0 and discovered a 3D X-Point memory die in the package. This is

Posted: May 2, 2017 Contributing Authors: Dick James, Fellow Emeritus During the ISSCC conference last February, Sony issued a press release describing “Industry's First 3-Layer Stacked CMOS Image Sensor with DRAM for Smartphones”. There have been rumours of image sensors with embedded DRAM (to

Posted: April 24, 2017 Contributing Authors: Andy Wei With the first set of Samsung Galaxy S8 teardowns, we have access now to the first SoCs produced on “10 nm” class technology. First to the 10 nm productization finish line is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, built on Samsung LSI Foundry’s 10 nm LPE