Product teardown
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A product teardown, or simply teardown, has an increasing interest in the technical community to provide answers as to which semiconductor components are utilized in various consumer electronic products, such as the Wii video game console and Apple's iPhone (as well the myriad of other mobile phones). Seeing what is inside of these systems can help the technical community to better understand how everything works, who has design wins, and can provide an estimate on the bill of materials. The financial community has an interest in teardowns, as it can help them guide stock valuation, as often companies are not allowed to announce that they are used in a system due to non-disclosure agreements. Finally, consumers are interested in finding out what makes their products "tick", but do not want to damage them by tearing them down.
Identifying semiconductor components in systems has become more difficult over the past years. The most notable change started with Apple's 8GB iPod nano[1], where they took readily available components, such as the Wolfson Microelectonics WM8750[2], and repackaged it with Apple branding. This makes it more difficult to identify the actual device manufacturer and function of the component without performing a decap – removing the outer packaging to analyze the die within. Typically there are markings on the die inside the package that can lead experienced engineers to who actually created the device and what functionality it performs in the system.
Teardowns have also been performed in front of a live studio audience at the Embedded Systems Conference. The first live teardown was performed on a Toyota Prius at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, April 2006. Since that time, additional live teardowns have been performed, most recently being the Sony OLED TV, Gibson Self-Tuning Guitar, SuitSat space suit, and Sony Rolly MP3 player [3].
There seem to be two major companies that perform teardowns - Portelligent and Semiconductor Insights, both of which write featured articles in EETimes and TechOnline on their findings. Both companies were acquired by TechInsights, a division of United Business Media in 2007. While Semiconductor Insights still remains focused on their other business opportunities, their teardown services, as well as Portelligent, are now part of TechOnline, which is a subgroup of United Business Media's TechInsights division. There also appear to be three main authors from these companies that write the articles. David Carey, President for Portelligent, Jeff Brown, Senior Analyst for Portelligent, and Gregory A. Quirk, Technical Marketing Manager for TechOnline.
