Samsung Galaxy S II taken apart, human ingenuity revealed

ABI Research, which is usually a provider of paid research for industry decision-makers in various categories, has taken the liberty to disassemble the Samsung Galaxy S II as part of its new Mobile Device Teardown service, and found a pretty elaborate industrial design inside.

We have been itching to have a glimpse at a real sample of the dual-core Samsung Exynos chipset, which, in the case of the Galaxy S II, is clocked at 1.2GHz, and now we have the chance. It is packaged in a 118.8 mm^2 die size, with the amperage roughly similar to the one of the NVIDIA Tegra 2 chipset, its most popular competitor. More about the dual-core beasts in our article here.

The teardown also revealed some neat tricks Samsung is using to keep power consumption at bay, and still provide one of the most powerful mobile chipsets on the market. There are a brand new multi-mode power amplifier from RF Micro Devices inside the system-on-a-chip, as well as new CMOS antenna switch and new multi-mode low power chip from Infineon, which provides the cellular connectivity. Infineon is a German company, which got acquired by Intel recently, and its chips are also used in the Apple iPhone 4 for connectivity, but its silicon in the Samsung Galaxy S II is one of the smallest integrated HSPA+ 4G solutions on the market.

Exynos in Greek means both "green" and "smart", says ABI Research's VP of engineering James Mielke, and the engineering solutions above explain the power-frugal nature of the Samsung Galaxy S II. The chipset accomplishments made James Mielke conclude: "Samsung started from scratch with this phone: almost every component is new. Its application processor is the most powerful on the market at present." Indeed, in our Samsung Galaxy S II review we clocked 62 hours uptime with average usage even without the new firmware update that improves on battery life.

Feast your eyes on a few sample pictures of the Samsung Galaxy S II teardown that we are being teased with below.

source: iFixit & ABIResearch via AvingWorld