Apple 3G iPhone Dissection Revealed TriQuint and Intel To Be the Surprise Winners

Apple Inc has just launched its long waiting 3G iPhone recently and you may wonder who will be the major components suppliers contributed to the success of the mass production. A preliminary dissection of the next generation iPhone by a team from iFixit revealed that both TriQuint Semiconductor and Intel to be the surprise winners, with Samsung still supplying its main processor core that serves as the brain of this famous gadget.

TriQuint Semoconductor has provided three major TQM series PA (Power Amplifier) chips that contributed to the 3G network capability in the iPhone. While first and second chip work as the UMTS Band 1 and Band 2 PA duplexers and output power detectors, the third chip completes the function as WCDMA/HSUPA PA duplexer for Band 5 and Band 6. Another surprise comes when Intel won over Spansion in the the deal with its 16MB NOR flash chip integrated into iPhone.

As expected, Apple still gets the supply of the main processor from Samsung as similar to its predecessor. However, this ARM based processor doesn’t combine the 8GB NAND flash memory but instead, it gets the flash memory supply from Toshiba. Some other vendors include SST, Skyworks and etc fill up those discrete components that offer various functionality to the powerful mobile device.
This approach is still in very early stage and we should expect more details to be available when the mobile unit falls into those gadget enthusiasts that are willing to sacrifice a brand new 3G iPhone for this purpose.