EETimes and TechOnLine give a breakdown of the chips that make up the iPhone, according to Semiconductor Insights and Portelligent. If you love taking things apart to see what's inside, you'll enjoy these articles.
Of the various components in the iPhone, one catches my attention more than the others. It's the Mobile Pixel Link from National Semiconductor. What's it do? It's a two-chip set that provides a serial link between a mainboard and the display. It's not just any serial link though. It's a very low power, very low noise link. According to National Semiconductor's site, the top three benefits are:
Fewest wires
Lowest power
Lowest EMI
All of these are quite valuable in a device like the iPhone where you want to squeeze out every bit of battery capacity.
After reading about the iPhone employing the Mobile Link, I thought to myself, "Yep, Apple really has put a lot of attention into designing the iPhone." In fact, discovering the use of the Mobile Link in the iPhone kind of reminds me of parsing through the original Apple II schematics back in the early 80s and seeing how cleverly the video and keyboard were supported.
Why is this interesting to me? Well, I know a couple engineers that worked on the core of this technology. Back a few years ago, they were working at a startup that focused on chips designed to power and control the pixels in LCD displays. A very focused market for sure. Along the way they worked to improve the connections made between let's say a mainboard in a laptop and display. You don't want lots of wires going through a hinge, for instance. They act like antennas collecting and emitting noise. All the noise means you have to fight it, usually in ways that consume more power. That's the last thing you want in a battery-powered laptop. The goal with the Mobile Link technology was to use fewer wires, lower power, and as a result generate less noise. With good positioning of the remaining wires, a much better display connector would emerge.
I can't give you any details about the technology, because that's about all I understand of it. I do recall a bunch of lunches at Red Lobster (among other restaurants) when the engineers were working through the first generation of the technology--brainstorming ideas, scribbling on napkins, and decompressing from each step they'd taken to that point.
In the end, they were quite enthusiastic about what they'd come up with. Eventually the startup sold and I haven't been following along with how the technology grew. The engineers moved on to other things. New problems. New solutions.
It's cool to see their hard work pay off in a device like the iPhone, no less. I wonder if they'll all switfch to iPhones now? It would be cool to have a component or piece of software running on a market-changing device like this.




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