iPhone SE apart by Chipworks: is a Frankenstein of iPhone 5S and 6S

As per tradition Chipworks got their hands on the new iPhone SE, taking it apart and discovering its inner secrets. It has often been said of the new Cupertino smartphone is an iPhone 6S tucked inside a shell of an iPhone 5S, which is partly true in technical terms according to new findings made by famous foreign source.

The Apple A9 chip used on iPhone SE is identical to that found on top of the 4.7-inch range. In the case of the unit analyzed by Chipworks it is a chip printed by TSMC, but this may change from device to device. We know that Apple A9 is designed by Apple, but manufactured by TSMC and Samsung by different manufacturing processes. The device uses the same RAM memory of the iPhone 6S, 2 gigabytes in LPDDR4 modules.

The production date of the iPhone unit SE disassembled by Chipworks is around August or September last year, just ahead of the launch of the iPhone 6S. It is likely that this is its own form provided for integration on the top of the range, or simply that Apple is working on a new model for several months. On the front of the storage integrated chip 16GB it is produced and supplied by Toshiba, a completely new chip in the line-up of Cupertino.

But not all the technical specifications were taken from the current top of the range: the touchscreen controller is for example the same as iPhone 5S and some iPod touch. In this case the chips are the Broadcom BCM5976 and Texas Instruments 343S0645 probably not compatible with the 3D technology of this Touch iPhone 6S. To implement the functionality likely Apple would have to choose more modern chips and probably expensive.

The solution adopted for the support NFC is the chip NXP 66VIO, the same iPhone 6S, as well as the inertial sensor 6 axes used for accelerometer and gyroscope. The modem at Qualcomm MDM9625M and audio controller are taken from the latest top of the range. However, there are also components "that we've never seen before," writes Chipworks: for example, the power amplifier Skyworks SKY77611, the controller for power management (TI 338S00170), the switch module to the antenna and the microphone AAC 0DALM1, in addition to NAND flash memory.