In 2011 Samsung defined a new category with its 5.3” diagonal Galaxy Note phone. The original Note was so large it was considered by many as a phone that aspired to be a tablet; hence the term “phablet” was coined. The Galaxy Note’s monstrous screen was so out of place in the phone marketplace that the competition didn’t event mount a comparable rebuttal for nearly 12 months. Now nearly every manufacture offers a 5+ inch device, but all still struggle to unseat the category leader.

With the 3rd iteration of the Galaxy Note, Samsung has refused to add kitschy features; rather it has focused on improving the human interaction elements in using this device as an all-in-one communications device. First off the ‘S-Pen’ continues to be linked into more of the embedded Samsung software and features while the new Galaxy Watch (teardown coming shortly) promises further improvements on how the user interacts with the devices proven functionality.

This TechInsights teardown isn’t about the software updates; rather our interest continues to lie under the hood. And with that in mind we crack open the Galaxy Note 3 to examine the horsepower needed to bring all these features to bear for the device’s user.

Applications/Baseband Processor Design Win – Qualcomm MSM8974

Manufactured in TSMC’s 28 nm HPM process, the MSM8974 is the new flagship applications/baseband processor from Qualcomm. Marketed as the ‘Snapdragon 800’, it features four processor cores and an LPDDR3 interface. It has design wins with several high-end smart phones, including Samsung’s Galaxy S4 LTE-A and now the Galaxy Note 3 N9005 LTE. With fierce direct competition from Nvidia and vertically integrated vendors like Apple, Qualcomm continues to push the limits of performance through architectural changes and the use of advanced process nodes.

Memory - Samsung packages twin stacks of LPDDR3 DRAM

From the x-ray image, we can see Samsung’s packaging solution for 3 GB of LPDDR3. You can see the two stacks of three dice, each wire bonded to the memory substrate. Although there is still plenty of talk about moving to TSV solutions for mobile DRAM, we can see here that wire bonding is still a viable solution.

Die size is 6.53 mm x 6.08 mm = 39.7 mm² and the Die mark is K4E4E324ED

Display - Better images are ‘PenTile’-tasic

The reason this phone is special is because of its screen. The original Galaxy Note measured 5.3” diagonally, the Galaxy Note 2 measured 5.5”, and the latest iteration stands tall at 5.7” of Super AMOLED beauty.

As seen in our teardown of the Galaxy S4, the Super AMOLED display is no longer an RGB matrix, but rather Samsung’s PenTile. More on Changing Display technologies in leading smartphones can be found in TechInsights Display Research reports. Without going into the specifics on the PenTile, the focus of Samsung with this new display technology has been to further develop the rendering of photos, videos, and screen input data while at the same time further reducing power consumption.