Posted: June 13, 2017 Contributing Authors: Ray Fontaine This year’s IISW marked the 10th anniversary of this biennial conference and corresponded to the 10th anniversary of TechInsights’ presence at the workshop. Don Scansen attended in 2007, under the Semiconductor Insights banner, and gave a

Posted: June 07, 2017 Contributing Authors: Jeongdong Choe, Senior Technical Fellow Figure 1. A comparison of memory density TechInsights has continued to dig into the process, cell structure and materials analysis of the Intel OptaneTM XPoint memory. We discovered that the Intel Optane TM XPoint

Posted: June 05, 2017 Contributing Authors: Jeongdong Choe, Senior Technical Fellow Die Photo SK hynix successively developed their 2nd generation 21 nm DRAM technology last year. Low yield and reliability issues on 21 nm 1st generation, means their new 2nd generation 21 nm DRAM cell technology has

Posted: May 18, 2017 Contributing Authors: Jeongdong Choe, Senior Technical Fellow Figure 1: Xpoint Memory Package Figure 2: Xpoint Memory Die (16 GB) TechInsights recently acquired and tore down an Intel OptaneTM M.2 80mm 16GB PCIe 3.0 and discovered a 3D X-Point memory die in the package. This is

Posted: May 2, 2017 Contributing Authors: Dick James, Fellow Emeritus During the ISSCC conference last February, Sony issued a press release describing “Industry's First 3-Layer Stacked CMOS Image Sensor with DRAM for Smartphones” . There have been rumours of image sensors with embedded DRAM (to

Posted: April 24, 2017 Contributing Authors: Andy Wei With the first set of Samsung Galaxy S8 teardowns , we have access now to the first SoCs produced on “10 nm” class technology. First to the 10 nm productization finish line is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, built on Samsung LSI Foundry’s 10 nm LPE

Posted: April 7, 2017, Updated: April 25, 2017 We are excited to announce receipt of our Galaxy S8. Our blog details teardown findings including cost observations, verification of the 10 nm LPE process, commentary on the Qualcomm WTR5975 Gigabit LTE Transceiver and envelope tracking power supplies

Posted: March 3, 2017, Updated: April 24, 2017 Nintendo Switch Packaging Friday was a big day for Nintendo, and indeed the gaming community as a whole, with the launch of the new and innovative console-tablet hybrid, the Nintendo Switch. For consumers lucky enough to get their hands on this new

Posted: January 20, 2017 Contributing Authors: Jim Morrison and Daniel Yang The AirPods were announced back in September of 2016 and our analysis team at TechInsights had eagerly anticipated them to be for sale in October. However, October and November came and went and still no AirPods and no real

Posted: October 27, 2016 Contributing Authors: Dick James Recently Google launched their Pixel phone with great fanfare and media response. This is the first phone for which Google designed the hardware, software, and cloud ecosystem, as opposed to the Google Nexus phones, which used the Android

Posted: October 17, 2016 Contributing Authors: Dick James One of the lesser-known stories of mobile phone evolution is the development of proximity sensing in order to save power and disable touch screen functions when the phone is actually being used as a phone. This essentially means turning off

Posted: October 7, 2016 Contributing Authors: Mandi Gingerich Fitbit Charge 2 Fitbit Charge 2 Now that we have had a look at Apple’s latest offering in the world of wearables, it’s time to dig into the latest from one of the original fitness tracker manufacturers, Fitbit. Replacing the Charge HR in