O'Grady's PowerPage

Tag: Infineon

  • Intel purchases Infineon’s wireless unit for $1.4 billion, gains access to new chipsets in deal

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    Processor giant Intel on Monday confirmed its plans to buy Infineon’s wireless division for US$1.4 billion in cash. The deal will see the company’s Wireless Solutions group work as a stand-alone company on Intel’s behalf and will give the company access to both 3G chipsets and a faster path to LTE-based 4G. It plans to use these not only for full-size notebooks but also Atom-based smartphones and tablets.

    Per Electronista, Infineon claimed the selloff was a win as it allowed a new focus on car, industrial and security technology. The sale is widely known to be prompted by the company’s struggles with making its wireless section profitable.

    The deal should be finished by early 2011.

    In an attempt to head off concerns, Intel said the stand-alone nature of the wireless group would let it keep serving existing customers, including those who use ARM chips. Concerns had been raised that the buyout would be used to force Apple to seek alternate suppliers for 3G chipsets in the iPad and iPhone, although the iPhone 4 is exempt as it has switched away.

    Intel’s plans are due to come together until 2011, when its Oak Trail platform for Atom chips should be efficient enough to be competitive.

  • iFixit posts results of iPad 3G teardown, finds changes to antenna structures

    If a new Apple product comes out, you tear it apart and report the findings.

    The cool cats at iFixit did exactly this by performing a full teardown of Apple’s newly-released iPad 3G tablet, which went on sale in the U.S. on Friday. Per the report, the following discoveries were made:

    – The immediate visible difference is the inclusion of a black plastic RF window on top of the iPad for better antenna reception.

    – The black RF window significantly changes the opening procedure. You cannot start separating the display using the notches on the top (à la the Wi-Fi version), since that will undoubtedly break the RF window. You have to start from the right side and gingerly proceed to the top and bottom of the iPad.

    – There are actually FIVE antennas in this iPad.

    – Two antennas handle the cell reception — one is in the RF window on top, the other attaches to the LCD frame.

    – A single GPS antenna is also housed in the RF window on top.

    – Just like the iPad Wi-Fi, there are two antennas that handle Wi-Fi / Bluetooth connectivity, one in the Apple logo and another to the left of the dock connector.

    – Apple looks to be using the entire LCD frame as an antenna. This approach draws parallels the company’s decision to also mount a wireless antenna to the frame of the optical drive on its new MacBook Pro notebooks.

    – Apple uses the same 3G baseband processor in both the iPhone 3GS and the iPad 3G.

    – The baseband processor in question is the Infineon 337S3754 PMB 8878 X-Gold IC. It was actually white-labeled on the production unit, but with enough sleuthing iFixIt was able to confirm its true identity.

    – The iPad 3G has a Broadcom BCM4750UBG Single-Chip AGPS Solution, whereas the iPhone 3GS uses an Infineon Hammerhead II package.

    – Apple did not change any major suppliers between manufacturing the pre-production unit they provided the FCC and their final production run.

  • First iPhone 3G S Teardown Goes Live, Shows 720p-Capable CPU

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    A recently-released teardown of Apple’s iPhone 3G S by RapidRepair has revealed the presence of a 720p HD-capable processor as well as a 600MHz ARM processor, Samsung’s S5PC100, based on the much more advanced Cortex A8 platform. However, official specifications (PDF) show that the chip could run at 833MHz and that, while Apple officially limits video recording to 640×480, the full-speed component could not only play but capture 720p.

    The S5PC100 is also technically capable of two-way video calling, although latency on current 3G networks is likely to discourage this.

    Per the teardown, Apple apparently chose to underclock the iPhone 3G S’ processor given heat and power concerns within a tight space, as was the case when the company scaled back previous iPhones’ processors from 600MHz to 412MHz. Unlike the iPod touch, the iPhone has cellular baseband hardware and other components that cut back on available energy and cooling areas.

    Along with confirming the main processor, the examination also shows the existence of 256MB of RAM (twice as much as on the past two iPhone generations), and that at least 16GB iPhone 3G S units use a single Toshiba NAND flash memory chip for storage.