Special hardware has been added to the iPhone to make it an effective and powerful mobile device. This includes various sensors, such as an accelerometer and proximity sensor, multi-touch capable screen to support gestures, and of course various radios including GSM, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.
In this article the chipset used in iPhone are reviewed and analyzed. iPhone consists of two main boards to carry all the hardware component it needs One board is taken from iPod design and contains application processor (CPU), disk (flash memory), motion sensors and Audio amplifier. The second board contains wireless flash memory, multimedia engine, blue tooth, and WiFi.
Architecture
The iPhone runs a mobile build of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), which is built upon BSD Unix and has many similarities to its desktop counterpart.
Apple has built a custom set of user interfaces around the iPhone to accommodate the proprietary hardware sensors and the use of multi-touch. While the desktop version of Leopard contains frameworks for building windows and common controls, the iPhone version of Leopard has replaced these frameworks with a version tailored for creating simple page-like user interfaces, transitions, and finger-friendly controls such as sliders and picker wheels.
Keyboard caches containing usernames, passwords, search terms, and historical fragments of typed communication. Nearly everything typed into the iPhone's keyboard is stored in a keyboard cache, which can stay in memory for sometime even after deleted.
Screenshots of the last state of an application are preserved, taken whenever the home button is pressed or an application is exited. These are used by the iPhone to create aesthetic zoom effects, and often provide several dozen snapshots of user activity.
The iPhone communicates with a computer via an interface called the Apple File Communication Protocol (AFC). This protocol is a serial port protocol that uses the USB Port and cable when it is connected to the computer and is responsible for things such as copying music and photos and installing firmware upgrades.
Wireless Board
EDGE Baseband Processor - Infineon PM8876 - S-Gold2
S-Gold2 is an advanced EDGE modem technology combined with latest multimedia functions. It is centered around ARM 926 CPU to provide horsepower for complicated, power hungry, software applications. Additionally it hosts on-chip the hardware needed for multimedia features, such as high resolution color display interface, dedicated camera interface for supporting camera applications for up to 2M Pixel, hardware support for MPEG4 encoding, Java hardware accelerator, and large number of connectivity peripherals.
S-Gold2 supports number of applications such as; still pictures and videos, 3D gaming, Java applications, and video streaming. S-Gold2 provides connectivity to Bluetooth, RF radio, WLAN, and A-GPS modules.
Some of it's key modem features include, GSM, E-GPRS, and GPRS multimedia phones, MP3 decoder, Echo cancellation, and Noise reduction.
EDGE MCP including peregrine SP4T RF switch
GSM/EDGE Power Amplifier - Skyworks Sky77340-13
WLAN - Marvel 90-nm 88W8686
This chip carries the WiFi functionality.
Bluetooth - CSR 41B14 - BlueCore4ROM
The bluetooth chip cames from CSR (Cambridge Silicon Radio).
GSM RF Transceiver - Infineon M1817A11
Wireless Flash Memory - Intel PF38F1030W0YTQ2
Wireless NOR Flash Memory (32Mbytes NOR + 16Mbytes SRAM)
iPOD Board
Application Processor (CPU) - Samsung/ARM S5L8900B01 (512Mbit SRAM dice)
The iPhone uses the ARM (advanced RISC machine) processor architecture, originally developed by ARM Ltd. In contrast, a majority of desktop machines use the Intel x86 architecture.
Early reports of the CPU clock speed put the iPhone’s ARM processor running at about 400 MHz with a bus speed at 100 MHz (Hockenberry). It is speculated that the ARM CPU can run at 600 MHz or more but is underclocked to provide for heat dissipation and battery life.
Flash Memory (Disk) - Samsung 65nm 8Gbit NAND Flash (K9MCG08U5M)
This chip is used as the main storage medium in computing and other digital applications. iPhone uses this flash memory just like a hard disk and partitions it, which is based on the Unix OS conventions as well. In order to store files on a hard disk, that raw physical device must first be prepared with partitions, or contiguous sections of a disk to store common groups of information.
There are two partitions on the iPhone. The first partition is 300 MB in size and is the system or root partition(not to be confused with the root folder which will be seen in the second partition). This partition contains the operating system and the default applications that are delivered with a factory fresh iPhone. for the life of the iPhone and contains the default applications and the untampered OS of the device. It contains most of the followings: SMS, Calendar, Photos, Camera, Youtube, Stocks, Maps, Wseather, Clock, Calculator, Notes, Setting, iTunes, Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod.
The remaining space of the hard disk is partitioned as the user-space (or media) partition. This space is where all music, videos contacts, SMS etc are stored.
Samsung is planning to build 64Gbit multi-level cell NAND flash memory chip based on a 30nm process in 2009. For those not versed in the arts of bits-to-bytes conversion, that's a single chip capable of storing 8GByte of data. A maximum of 16 64Gbit flash devices can be combined to make a 128 Gigabyte memory card that can store 80 DVD resolution movies or 32,000 MP3 music files.
Stereo Audio Codec Processor - Wolfson WM8758BG
This chip is the I2S voice codec. A very good sound quality part, even better than used in iPod.
Motion Sensor - STMicroelectronics LIS302DT
This chip has a sensing element, capable of detecting acceralation using a dedicated process to produce internal sensors and actualtors in silicoln. It is capable of detecting free-fall, motion activated functions, and vibration monitoring.
Apple (NXP) Power Manager
This chip, from NXP (Philips before), is the power manager with the switching power supplies.
USB Battery Charger - Linear Technology 4066
This chip is maily used to charges Single Cell Li-Ion Batteries Directly from USB Port or 5v wall adapter.
Other Parts
Touch Screen: Balda
The Touch Screen is from German manufacturer Balda. There is a SPI multi-touch I/O controller from Broadcom (BCM5973A)
Camera
The camera has a Micron 2Mpixel sensor (MT9D112D00STC).
Display
The display is 320x480, can be a Samsung or AUO module.
Battery
The battery is a Li-IonPolymer 3.7V.
About me:
bruce atlasi is a professional computer engineer, skilled in telecomm and datacomm technologies and architecture. He has diverse working experience with many telecomm start-ups and fortune 100 companies, including Cisco Systems, IBM, and Siemens. He regularly blogs on About Hi-Tech site.
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