Inside the iPhone 5s

Contributed by Jason Tanner, Jim Morrison, Dick James, Ray Fontaine and Phil Gamache

Mission Accomplished
Amidst long midnight lineups and rumors of supply shortages, we here at Chipworks have managed to get our hands on Apple’s latest entry to the smartphone market: the iPhone 5s.

Phone in-hand, we did what any self-respecting technology company would do – destroy it (carefully). Follow us along today as we dive into what’s new and exciting this time around, including the A7 64-bit ARM CPU and the mysterious M7 motion co-processor.

The Design Wins
Since our good friends at iFixit are located in Australia, they got their phones in before we did. On Thursday night we spent time with their team helping them identify some of the device wins we could seek out from the pictures they sent us.

At first glance we’re seeing a lot of familiar components with the major standouts being the new A7 processor and two new MEMS devices. We are also seeing a new power management IC by Dialog Semiconductor and a new audio codec and class D amplifier by Cirrus Logic. Here are some of the components that were difficult to discern.

Click here to read more ...