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3G iPhone Teardown: Infineon Gets Built-In GPS Contract, Not Broadcom

by Justin

3G iPhone Inside

There are a heck of a lot of hardcore iPhone fans out there, but we’d have to say the boys from ifixit take the cake.  Flying all the way to New Zealand from the United States, these guys secured the #4 spot at an Auckland Vodafone store just to get their hands on a new 3G iPhone to take apart.  That’s right, the Vodafone-locked second-gen iPhone isn’t too useful in the United States at the moment, so this is definitely classified as a hardcore move.  But while ifixit definitely got some good pics, it wasn’t until TechOnline used some fancy tools and techniques to teardown the 3G iPhone that we really knew what it was made of.

So what exactly is inside the new 3G iPhone?  First check out these two vids that show a comprehensive analysis of the torndown iPhone. The first video focuses on the main board while the second video focuses on memory suppliers and the phone’s Bluetooth and WiFi capabilities.

Now that you’ve seen that, click on the thumbnail for a detailed look at the 3G iPhone’s guts.

3G iPhone Guts

Most important to us GPS fanatics is of course the 3G iPhone’s built-in GPS. As you can see from the picture, the new location-aware capabilities come from Infineon’s PMB 2525 Hammerhead II chip. Accurate to within just a few meters, the Hammerhead II “integrates an assisted-GPS (A-GPS) baseband processor with a low-noise GPS RF front end and multi-path mitigation to avoid large errors in urban environments”. Some have said that the chip’s die markings indicate that it’s actually a Hammerhead I chip, but one analyst involved in the teardown says that it’s common practice for a company to take an old chip and make routing and/or connection modifications and then label the modded chip “new”.

So it looks like Apple didn’t go with the rumored Broadcom chip after all.

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2 comments

1 3G iPhone’s GPS Gets Reviewed, Wishes It Didn’t | GPS Obsessed { 07.16.08 at 1:01 am }

[...] everyone is particularly happy with the 3G iPhone’s GPS capabilities.  Powered by an Infineon Hammerhead II chip, the 3G iPhone’s GPS capabilities falls short in a couple of key areas.  Number one, [...]

2 How Much Does The iPhone Actually Cost To Make? | GPS Obsessed { 07.16.08 at 5:02 am }

[...] 3G iPhone has been torndown, taken apart, and analyzed deeper than Freud could have ever analyzed your mind.  But how much [...]

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