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A product teardown, or simply teardown, is the act of disassembling a product, such that it helps to identify its component parts, chip & system functionality, and component costing information. For products having 'secret' technology, such as the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25, the process may be secret. For others, including consumer electronics, the results are typically disseminated through photographs and component lists so that others can make use of the information without having to disassemble the product themselves. This information is important to designers of semiconductors, displays, batteries, packaging companies, integrated design firms, and semiconductor fabs, and the systems they operate within.
This information can be of interest to hobbyists, but can also be used commercially by the technical community to find out, for example, what semiconductor components are being utilized in consumer electronic products, such as the Wii video game console or Apple's iPhone. Such knowledge can aid understanding of how the product works, including innovative design features, and can facilitate estimating the bill of materials (BOM). The financial community, therefore, has an interest in teardowns, as knowing how a company's products are built can help guide a stock valuation. Manufacturers are often not allowed to announce what components are present in a product due to non-disclosure agreements (NDA). Teardowns can also play a part in evidence of use in court and litigation proceedings where a company's parts may have been used without their permission, counterfeited, or to show where intellectual property or patents might be infringed by another firm's part or system.
Identifying semiconductor components in systems has become more difficult over the past years. The most notable change started with Apple's 8GB iPod nano, [1] [2] which were repackaged with Apple branding. This makes it more difficult to identify the actual device manufacturer and function of the component without performing a 'delid' – removing the outer packaging to analyze the die within it. Typically there are markings on the die inside the package that can lead experienced engineers to see who actually created the device and what functionality it performs in the system.
An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip, computer chip, or simply chip, is a small electronic device made up of multiple interconnected electronic components such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors. These components are etched onto a small piece of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Integrated circuits are used in a wide range of electronic devices, including computers, smartphones, and televisions, to perform various functions such as processing and storing information. They have greatly impacted the field of electronics by enabling device miniaturization and enhanced functionality.
A personal digital assistant (PDA) is a multi-purpose mobile device which functions as a personal information manager. By 2007, PDAs have been mostly displaced by the widespread adoption of more highly capable smartphones, in particular those based on iOS and Android, and thus saw a rapid decline afterwards.
An application-specific integrated circuit is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficiency video codec. Application-specific standard product chips are intermediate between ASICs and industry standard integrated circuits like the 7400 series or the 4000 series. ASIC chips are typically fabricated using metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) technology, as MOS integrated circuit chips.
The JEDEC Solid State Technology Association is an independent semiconductor engineering trade organization and standardization body headquartered in the United States.
Consumer electronics or home electronics are electronic equipment intended for everyday use, typically in private homes. Consumer electronics include devices used for entertainment, communications and recreation. These products are usually referred to as black goods due to many products being housed in black or dark casings. This term is used to distinguish them from "white goods" which are meant for housekeeping tasks, such as washing machines and refrigerators, although nowadays, these would be considered black goods, some of these being connected to the Internet. In British English, they are often called brown goods by producers and sellers. In the 2010s, this distinction is absent in large big box consumer electronics stores, which sell entertainment, communication and home office devices, light fixtures and appliances, including the bathroom type.
Automatic test equipment or automated test equipment (ATE) is any apparatus that performs tests on a device, known as the device under test (DUT), equipment under test (EUT) or unit under test (UUT), using automation to quickly perform measurements and evaluate the test results. An ATE can be a simple computer-controlled digital multimeter, or a complicated system containing dozens of complex test instruments capable of automatically testing and diagnosing faults in sophisticated electronic packaged parts or on wafer testing, including system on chips and integrated circuits.
A portable media player (PMP) or digital audio player (DAP) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. The data is typically stored on a compact disc (CD), Digital Versatile Disc (DVD), Blu-ray Disc (BD), flash memory, microdrive, SD cards or hard drive; most earlier PMPs used physical media, but modern players mostly use flash memory. In contrast, analogue portable audio players play music from non-digital media that use analogue media, such as cassette tapes or vinyl records.
PortalPlayer, Inc., founded in 1999, was a fabless semiconductor company that supplied system-on-a-chip semiconductors, firmware and software for personal media players. The company handled semiconductor design and firmware development, while subcontracting the actual semiconductor manufacturing to merchant foundries.
A contract manufacturer (CM) is a manufacturer that contracts with a firm for components or products. It is a form of outsourcing. A contract manufacturer performing packaging operations is called copacker or a contract packager. Brand name companies focus on product innovation, design and sales, while the manufacturing takes place in independent factories.
The iPod Nano is a discontinued portable media player designed and formerly marketed by Apple Inc. The first-generation model was introduced on September 7, 2005, as a replacement for the iPod Mini, using flash memory for storage. The iPod Nano went through several models, or generations, after its introduction. Apple discontinued the iPod Nano on July 27, 2017.
Jonathan J. "Jon" Rubinstein is an American electrical engineer who played an instrumental role in the development of the iMac and iPod, the portable music and video device first sold by Apple Computer Inc. in 2001. He left his position as senior vice president of Apple's iPod division on April 14, 2006.
The Nike+iPod Sports Kit is an activity tracker device, developed by Nike, Inc., which measures and records the distance and pace of a walk or run. The Nike+iPod consists of a small transmitter device attached to or embedded in a shoe, which communicates with either the Nike+ Sportband, a receiver plugged into an iPod Nano. It can also work directly with a 2nd Generation iPod Touch, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, The Nike+iPod was announced on May 23, 2006. On September 7, 2010, Nike released the Nike+ Running App on the App Store, which used a tracking engine powered by MotionX that does not require the separate shoe sensor or pedometer. This application works using the accelerometer and GPS of the iPhone and the accelerometer of the iPod Touch, which does not have a GPS chip. Nike+Running is compatible with the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus down to iPhone 3GS and iPod touch. On June 21, 2012, Nike released Nike+ Running App for Android. The current app is compatible with all Android phones running 4.0.3 and up.
OmniVision Technologies Inc. is an American subsidiary of Chinese semiconductor device and mixed-signal integrated circuit design house Will Semiconductor. The company designs and develops digital imaging products for use in mobile phones, laptops, netbooks webcams, security, entertainment, automotive and medical imaging systems. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, OmniVision Technologies has offices in the US, Western Europe and Asia.
Consumer IR, consumer infrared, or CIR is a class of devices employing the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum for wireless communications. CIR ports are commonly found in consumer electronics devices such as television remote controls, PDAs, laptops, computers, and video game controllers.
The iPod Touch is a discontinued line of iOS-based mobile devices designed and formerly marketed by Apple Inc. with a touchscreen-controlled user interface. As with other iPod models, the iPod Touch can be used as a portable media player and a handheld gaming device, but can also be used as a digital camera, a web browser, for email and messaging. It is nearly identical in design to the iPhone, and can run most iPhone third-party apps from the App Store, but it connects to the Internet only through Wi-Fi and uses no cellular network data, as it lacks a cellular modem.
Product binning is the categorizing of finished products based on their characteristics. Any mining, harvesting, or manufacturing process will yield products spanning a range of quality and desirability in the marketplace. Binning allows differing quality products to be priced appropriately for various uses and markets.
IEEE 1394 is an interface standard for a serial bus for high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer. It was developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Apple in cooperation with a number of companies, primarily Sony and Panasonic. It is most commonly known by the name FireWire (Apple), though other brand names exist such as i.LINK (Sony), and Lynx.
The hacking of consumer electronics is a common practice that users perform to customize and modify their devices beyond what is typically possible. This activity has a long history, dating from the days of early computer, programming, and electronics hobbyists.
In electronics, a chip carrier is one of several kinds of surface-mount technology packages for integrated circuits. Connections are made on all four edges of a square package; compared to the internal cavity for mounting the integrated circuit, the package overall size is large.
In the early twenty-first century; foreign investment, government regulations and incentives promoted growth in the Indian electronics industry. The semiconductor industry, which is its most important and resource-intensive sector, profited from the rapid growth in domestic demand. Many industries, including telecommunications, information technology, automotive, engineering, medical electronics, electricity and solar photovoltaic, defense and aerospace, consumer electronics, and appliances, required semiconductors. However, as of 2015, progress was threatened by the talent gap in the Indian sector, since 65 to 70 percent of the market was dependent on imports.