Motorola Droid Teardown Analysis!
Yesterday’s teardown received a lot of hype. We’re glad we could cater to what many of our readers obviously enjoy! We’ve been working hard with “our friends in high places” to really figure out what makes this thing chug.
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The device PCB is covered in what we call “cans” which provide ESD, heat and RF interrupt protection. In order to see what’s on the board, Dr.Wreck has to carefully remove each one by melting away the solder points. This is not an easy process as we try our best to keep the device in fully functional order.
On that note, many of you have actually challenged us to reverse yesterdays directions and put this thing back together! This is an entirely possible feat, had we not fully removed the shields. Even so, we’ll be putting this device back together (shields and all) in an attempt to prove that you can ENTIRELY disassemble a device to bare IC’s and logic board and still re-assemble for full functionality.
We also wanted to take a moment to talk about the progression of mobile devices (note that in this image the Droid’s PCB is fully naked!). On the right side of this photo we have an old “nameless” Nokia device. Back in the day, a devices size was limited by the PCB and the allocation of it’s parts. On the Droid, there is so much integrated functionality that the PCB is actually one of the smallest parts on the device. Of very interesting notice, the screen on the Nokia device is smaller than the PCB. The absolute OPPOSITE is true on the Droid.
Dr.Wreck has that wistful glean of the past in his eye…. sigh…
Here we have the functional Block Diagram put together by Dr.Wreck for the Motorola Droid.
This device isn’t that much unlike the Palm Pre. The OMAP 3430 is a very promising platform that features the same Imagination Technologies POWERVR SGX graphics core. However, when fully considered there really isn’t much that compares in terms of full scale integration.
Strangely enough, the device backed by one of Verizon’s largest ad-campaigns as the iPhone killer only has 256MB of RAM and 256MB of integrated NAND storage. How will the Android platform ever contend? Well, Dr.Wreck is currently working on his review… stay tuned for that insight. In the case of the Droid, both memories are provided by Japanese Toshiba. The RAM is stacked on top of the OMAP Applications Core.
Here we have the top of the logic board. Unfortunately, it is difficult to identify many of the larger IC’s on this side. Thankfully, Dr.Wreck has X-ray vision and the ability to feel an IC in order to determine it’s functionality.
We can see the TI TWL5030 PMIC which offers integrated USB, Audio Codec and control over that big 1420mAh BP6x battery. We also see the RF multiplexer’s – one from both AVAGO (FEM7758) and Triquint (TQM613029).
Unfortunately the WiFI/Bluetooth chips are unmarked. If any readers have industry knowledge or an opinion of what these chips might be, feel free to share – that’s what it’s all about!
The underside of the PCB reveals a fairly big surprise – the fairly rare QSC6085 BaseBand with integrated GPS and transceiver functionality. We also see the location of the OMAP processor, cleverly buried underneath the un-distinguishable Toshiba RAM. Not only did Motorola not want us to take this device apart, they didn’t want us to find out what makes it run!
Another really interesting tidbit that pops up on the underside of the board is the Toshiba memory with hand-written markings. More interesting is that these markings appear to say “s”, “2″ and “p”! Here at phonewreck, we’ve been contemplating this phenomena and have come to the conclusion that Sanjay (Co-CEO of Motorola) must have personally signed each chip that went into the Droid. More or less a mark of approval we suppose.
In all seriousness though, this is probably the marking of a sample part. Why in the world is Motorola releasing production devices with sample IC’s? This is only conjecture, but the Droid is supposed to do a multi-million unit run. Hopefully there aren’t quality issues relating to device longevity! Am I right?! Am I right?!
Droid antenna, PCB and Camera Module
This last image shows a close-up of the devices sliding mechanism.
And that’s it! Thanks to everyone who e-mailed in with their support from yesterday’s entry!
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Until Next time, KEEP WRECKING!
Which type of the PMIC? That IC is not TLW5030 on board.
Its really hard to judge by the pics, but does it appear there would be an easy way to tighten up these “simple” Sliding Mechanisms, mine is loose, but I’d rather not ever deal with Verizon, ever
Do you know where the second microphone is located? As far as I know there is a second mic on top or on the back of the device.
Excellent blog about phoneWreck » Motorola Droid Teardown Analysis!. I read it twice.
To me the initals (“s”, “2″ and “p”) appear to be be an “n” “p” and the two s’s are sinewaves – perhaps this shows signal side and power side.
Also on that same side of the board some of the surface mount components seem to be poorly positioned at an angle, this is not a good manufacturing technique.
Thank you for presenting this website.
Has anyone measured the power/impedance of the headphone jack? Should be something around 32 ohm/20 mw?
TIA
i dont think this droid is coming back together again… those surface mount components seems offset at an angle caused by heat trying to get those metal shields off.. the solder probably started melting as a result of the board getting too hot. also look at the first pic… the lcd connectors seem burnt… you’re lucky if this still works…. probably an insurance salvage phone, or something thats already stuffed.
surface mount pcb’s are putting electronic repair shops out of work, as nothing can really be worked upon… it’s too small… and just the wrong amount of heat melts the ball grid array chips. dump and replace. the droid is amazing though, and thank you for sharing this with us… been trying to get a pic of the TI OMAP 3430 (with PowerVR SGX 530) application processor for a while now… the droid is still the fastest gaming phone out there, and that little chip beats the snapdragon in every game. now just to put that GPU to use in the android os itself