Thuraya APsi SO-2510 Satellite Mobile Phone Teardown

Main Features / Overview

Thuraya is one of 5 companies currently offering satellite mobile phone service at the time of writing (Q4 2007). Thuraya, has it's focus from Europe and Africa in the West, to much of the rest of the Asian content in the East, with it's primary service gap in the Americas, but also at the south end of the African continent, and much of the Eastern parts of China, Russia, Asia and Australia.

Thuraya currently offers two main handsets, the SO-2510 (this anlaysis) and SG-2520. Both handsets are from another company in Korea called APsi (Asia Pacific Satellite Industry) which appears to be the designer and manufacturer of the handsets. The main functional difference between the two handset models currently offered is that the SG-2520 also offers GSM terrestrial network accessibility, where the SO-2510 does not. Both devices offer very basic GPS functionality (coordinates).

The SO-2510 is the more basic, satellite-only phone offered by Thuraya and is the lightest and smallest designs among satellite service providers, according to Thuraya,

Thuraya APsi SO-2510 Satellite Mobile Phone Main Image

Businesses, executives operating in more remote areas, developing countries, etc. The costs of the service are above average when compared with cellular networks, and the equipment is expensive to produce in low-volumes also raising the costs. These elevated costs raise entrance-level of this device to those individuals and enterprises with the necessary budgets to overcome these barriers to entry.

Released

Press releases date Nov 2006 - but seems product was out to market several months prior - late Q3 2006 assumed.

Thuraya APsi SO-2510 Satellite Mobile Phone - Main PCB Top

From one vendor (GMPCS Personal Communications) - $865 USD at the time of writing (Q4 2007).

Volume Estimations

For the purposes of this teardown, we estimate unit shipments for the Thuraya / APsi SG-2520 over the course of a 3 to 4-year production lifetime would be on an order of magnitude of 360K units. These volume assumptions are based on general information found on the size of Thuraya's market, but also their own press releases relative to volumes expected to be sold in 2006 and 2007. We are assuming an above average lifetime (3 to 4 years) when compared to the average cellular handset (1 - 2 years), hence increasing the volume.

As a reminder, volume production assumptions are not meant to be necessarily 'market accurate', but are meant primarily to be used for our cost analysis in terms of amortized NRE and tooling costs, especially for custom components specific to the model being analyzed (mechanical components especially).

Thuraya APsi SO-2510 Satellite Mobile Phone - Main PCB Bottom

Functional testing was not performed on the Thuraya / APsi SO-2510

Thuraya APsi SO-2510 Satellite Mobile Phone Cost Analysis

What Is Not Included in our Cost Analysis

The total materials and manufacturing costs reported in this analysis reflect ONLY the direct materials cost (from component vendors and assorted EMS providers), AND manufacturing with basic test. Not included in this analysis are costs above and beyond the material manufacture of the core device itself - cost of intellectual property, royalties and licensing fees (those not already included into the per component price), software, software loading and test, shipping, logistics marketing and other channel costs including not only EMS provider and the OEM's margin, but that of other resellers. Our cost analysis is meant to focus on those costs incurred in the manufacture of the core device and exceptionally in some circumstances the packaging and literature as well.

Thuraya APsi SO-2510 Satellite Mobile Phone - Enclosure Main Top Removal

APsi Relationships / Manufacturing

APsi is not a well-known company, nor well-known to us at iSuppli. It is assumed that they are using EMS providers for the manufacturing, but who this would be, we do not know.

Country of Origin / EMS provider

This product was labeled Made in Korea. Furthermore, we have assumed that for this model, that PCB was also populated, and that furthermore, custom mechanicals (plastics and metals) were sourced in Korea.

Country of origin assumptions relate directly to the associated cost of manufacturing, where calculated by iSuppli. In the cases of 'finished' sub-assemblies (such as Bluetooth modules or camera modules), we do not calculate internal manufacturing costs, but rather assess the market price of the finished product in which case country of origin assumptions may or may not have a direct effect on pricing.

Remember also that labor rates are applied directly only to hand inserted components and systems in our bill of materials, and although regional assumptions do, these new rates do not have a direct effect on our modeled calculations of placement costs for automated SMD assembly lines. "Auto inserted components (such as SMT components) placement costs are calculated by an iSuppli algorithm which allocates a cost per component based on the size and pincount of the device. This calculation is affected by country or region of origin as well.

Design for Manufacturing / Device Complexity

Overall, the APsi / Thuraya SO-2510 has a total component count of 1228 components, of which 49 are mechanical in nature. Comparatively speaking, we have no real direct points of comparison (i.e. satellite phones), but when compared with the 'average' handset, the Thuraya SO-2510, despite having ~35% components than Thuraya's combination Satellite/GSM SG-2520, is still very component heavy and on the order of a very high-end GSM phone, or even a PDA in terms of sheer component count. Athough this seemed initially shocking in both the SO-2510 and SG-2520, this is not surprising considering APsi's totally 'discrete' approach to the design - there is little opportunity for integration in such a low-volume design.

The number of mechanical components usually is a direct driver of hand-assembly costs, whereas the electronic component count (and I/O count, density, etc.) are relative metrics for the more automated portion (namely SMT assembly) of manufacturing costs.

Component counts have a direct bearing on the overall manufacturing cycle times and costs, and also can increase or decrease overall yields and re-work. Our calculations of manufacturing costs factor counts and more qualitative complexities in the design. The cost of manufacturing is also, to some extent, decreased in this case because of assumed labor rate applied for China.

Note that manual labor has a much smaller effect on auto-insertion assembly lines (for the Main PCB, for example), where manufacturing costs are much more capital equipment intensive and driven by these investment costs.

Design notes

The Thuraya SO-2510 design benefits from economies of scale by using almost the exact same components in the Satellite-side functionality of the Thuraya SG-2520 phone. The SO-2510 is very basic when compared with the SG-2520 and has significantly fewer major integrated circuits and lower overall dollar content as a result of not applying all the extra bells and whistles from the other design. This also makes the design less power consumptive.

The design used in both this and the SG-2520 strike us as old. The components chosen are all several years old, and the core OMAP processor used in both designs is not recommended for new designs. As we expect the lifetime of this product to be several years, it may become an issue to obtain parts if some become obsolete during the course of the product's lifetime, or at the very least, will represent increasing costs for the manufacturer.

Major components:

Main PCB

MPU

• Application Processor - Texas Instruments - OMAP1510 - Dual Core, TMS320C55x DSP & ARM925 Core, 130nm

Baseband

• Baseband - SAT - ASIC Chip - Manufacturer Unknown

Battery / Power Management

• Power Management IC - Texas Instruments - TPS65010RGZTG4

Memory

• MCP - Intel - RD38F4050L0YBQ0 - 256Mb NOR Flash + 64Mb PSRAM

SAT Rx / Tx

• IF Subsystem - Analog Devices - AD9864BCPZ - w/ LNA, Mixer, Band-Pass ADC, Decimation Filter, & AGC Circuit
• TX IF - NEC - uPC8195K - AGC Amplifier & Quadryture Modulator

User Interface

• Audio Codec - Texas Instruments - TLV320AIC1110ZQER - PCM PCM Sound Generator - Oki Semiconductor - ML2871 - 32 Polyphony
• SMbus - 16-bit GPIO Expansion - NXP - PCA9535BS

Display Module

• 1.5' Diagonal, 262K Color TFT, 128 x 128 Pixels

Thuraya APsi SO-2510 Satellite Mobile Phone - Box Contents