News
TEARDOWN
Apple iPhone 4 drives high, low tech
By Rick Merritt
SAN JOSE, CALIF. — Apple’s iPhone 4
pushes the envelope in its use of both
3-D chip stacks and manual system
assembly, according to a presentation
by UBM TechInsights.
The iPhone 4 is among the first main-
stream smartphones to use as much sili-
con area as printed-circuit board area,
thanks to the design’s aggressive use of
3-D chip stacking. The handset also has
an unusually high number of small
mechanical parts, requiring intensive
manual labor assembly, comparable to
Cross section of the iPhone 4 board.
that used to produce high-end wrist-
watches, said David Carey, a teardown
expert at UBM TechInsights, sister com-
pany to EE Times.
The net result is a system in which
“the electronics virtually disappear,”
Carey said in a talk at the recent Linley
Mobile Tech Conference here. The chips
are among the few components that can
be miniaturized in mobile systems,
“opening up as much internal volume
as possible for the battery and display,”
said Carey.
OF THE TIMES
SOURCE: UBM TechInsights
The iPhone 4’s L-shaped printed-cir-
cuit board is tucked around its battery.
Creating such a small, dense design
pushed more complexity to the board
itself; the board has 10 layers, with tiny
connections between layers made by
lasers and photoimaging rather than by
traditional, drilled vias.
The board is “basically a macro ver-
sion of structures and processes we see
in [semiconductor] chip layers,” Carey
said. “It looks like an IC cross section
and is much more expensive than a
May 2, 2011 Electronic Engineering Times 7
 NEWS OF THETIMES
Display/touchscreen
/display window
Main enclosure
User interface flex
Sensor klex & WiFi/
BT/A-GPS antenna
Subassemblies in the iPhone 4. SOURCE: UBM TechInsights
traditional circuit board.”
The technique adds a small but signif-
icant cost premium that Carey estimat-
ed at about a penny per layer for each
square centimeter of board space. UBM
TechInsights puts the resultant board
cost at about $5—a $3 to $4 premium
per unit over some handset boards.
“It’s table stakes for that form factor,”
said Carey. “Apple doesn’t have to com-
pete on price, so their handsets can cost
more to make; they have that luxury.”
Chip stacks are widely used in
smartphones, but few handsets have
the 1:1 silicon- to board-area ratio of the
iPhone 4. Many use multilayer pc
boards with microvias, but few use
10-layer boards, Carey said.
“We first saw a 10-layer handset
board in a Nokia pen-sized phone five
or six years ago. Every smartphone we
look at is at least partly down this
path,” Carey said. But few go to the
iPhone 4’s extremes.
8 Electronic Engineering Times May 2, 2011
Main board
Battery
Home
key flex
Earpiece
Vibrator
5MP camera VGA camera
Key covers MicroSIM
Main antenna &
ejector lever speaker sssembly
Handmade in China?
The iPhone 4 also is unique in the num-
ber and variety of small assemblies used
in the handset.
“There are a lot of small, complex
assemblies with flex circuits and things
hanging off them, and an awful lot of
small screws,” Carey said. “Some of
these parts may self-align, but many of
them look like parts requiring fairly
meticulous assembly.
“I think it requires a lot of human
capital, with a lot of people at a lot of
tables [performing] what is effectively
by-hand assembly. You have to carefully
hand fit these little flex parts because
they are not amenable to a lot of auto-
mated assembly.”
Compared with the iPhone 4, Carey
said, “Nokia phones look more designed
for automated assembly, and Samsung
and HTC handsets may be somewhere
in between. Things designed for auto-
mated assembly cannot achieve as
Battery cover
Clamps, clips,& gaskets
MicroSIM
holder
Moisture sensor Screws & washers
much miniaturization, because the
human hand can pack things in the
way machines can’t.”
The iPhone 4 is slimmer than some
competing models that appear designed
for automated assembly, Carey noted.
He said he had “never toured a Fox-
conn factory” where iPhones are made.
“But I have toured a Citizen watch facto-
ry, and I think Apple is doing what the
watch industry figured out years ago.
“The human capital it costs to crank
out millions of these [handsets] is pretty
amazing,” he said.
Apple came under fire for its use of
low-wage labor at Foxconn, where a
string of worker suicides brought in-
creased scrutiny of working conditions
at the contract manufacturer’s facilities.
Foxconn is reportedly looking to move
operations from increasingly expensive
coastal areas of China to the country’s
interior, where wages presumably would
be lower. p
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