Apple has yet again chosen Samsung as the fabricator for its A7 chip, according to information uncovered by the experts at Chipworks.
Samsung has been involved in many legal battles with Apple in recent times, but that hasn"t stopped the company from being the preferred chip-maker of the Cupertino-based company for its tablets and smartphones. Apple has been reported to be working with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company for its ARM-based A-series of chips from time to time, however, it doesn"t seem that TSM has been given the green signal for the latest devices. Although Apple has been planning to reduce its reliance on Samsung for components such as flash memory and RAM, all of its SOCs to date have been manufactured by Samsung.
A7 is the chip that powers Apple"s flagship iPhone, the 5s. According to Chipworks, the A7, which is based on an advanced 28nm manufacturing process, is manufactured by Samsung"s chip foundry. The A7 system-on-chip consists of a dual-core CPU. In addition to the CPU, iPhone 5s also has a "M7" co-processor, manufactured by NXP, which processes motion data from the accelerometer, gyroscope and compass. The iSight camera module used in the iPhone 5s is found to be a custom Exmor-RS sensor made by Sony. Some other parts of the device include a touchscreen controller from Broadcom, multi-band 4G LTE modem and RF power management chip by Qualcomm.
A detailed teardown of the internals of the iPhone 5s can be found at iFixit and the SOC related research is posted by Chipworks.