It’s hard to believe that something so small could be capable of producing great photos and video. The folks over at Chipworks took apart the new iPhone 4s to see which manufacturers supplied their products to Apple. While they point out that Apple may have sourced more than one manufacturer due to the large number of units they produced, the results from their investigation can be read below.
The external markings on the underside reveal nothing more than serial number and lot codes from the company who did final assembly of the camera module. Next we have a great side x-ray of the module where we can see the lens assembly that is delivering 1080P at 30 fps. This bares a lot of similarity to the prior generation iPhone 4 that had an OmniVision design win.
In order to get our readers the device manufacturer as soon as possible, rather than going through a fuming sulfuric acid chip deprocessing we chose to use our infrared microscope to look through the structure of this image sensor. What you see are the die markings on the base layer of the image sensor. The image isn’t beautiful, but it’s enough to tell us that Sony is in our particular iPhone 4S.
Now the other device we have been very curious about is the touch screen controller. The touch screen controller on the previous generation iPhone 4 was Texas Instruments and drum roll please, Texas Instruments has scored again. Apple has stuck with the Texas Instruments. The part number 343S0538 is fabricated by Texas Instruments for Apple. TI has adopted a wafer scale package in this version to save costs. The device was tested in August of 2011. Fresh from our shelves to you! – Chipworks
Link: iPhone 4s Teardown
