Samsung BlackJack II Mobile Phone Teardown

Overview

The SGH-i617 (Blackjack II) is a Mid to High-End PDA phone from Samsung, supporting 3.5G (HSDPA) tri-band UMTS & quad-band GSM EDGE. It comes with Windows Mobile 6.0, a 2.4 inch 240x320 Pixel 65K color TFT display, a 2.0MP CMOS camera, a full QWERTY keyboard & a MicroSD memory card expansion slot. Other highlights include Bluetooth V2.0+EDR, streaming and MPEG4/H.264/WMV video, and real-time email delivery.

Samsung BlackJack II Mobile Phone Main Image

High-end users with the idea of always-connected. This is an upper-market GSM/EDGE/HSDPA 3.5G phone.

Release / Availability

July, 2007.

Pricing

Available online at the time of writing from AT&T for $349.99.

Volume Estimations

For the purposes of this teardown analysis, we have assumed a lifetime production volume of 1.2 Million units.

As a reminder, teardown volume production assumptions are primarily 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). Unless assumed volumes are different by an order of magnitude, minor changes in volume (say 1 million vs. 2 million) rarely have a large net effect on our final analysis because of this.

Samsung BlackJack II Mobile Phone - Main PCB Top

ISuppli's Design Forecast Tool (DFT) and Market Shares

As part of iSuppli's Design Forecast Tool (DFT), we forecast handset shipments by major design feature and manufacture, as well as the number of design starts a manufacturer will have by feature set.

From our Design Forecast Tool (DFT), we estimate unit shipments of 168 million units of HSDPA handsets in the 2008 global market. We further estimate unit shipments of 289 million 2Mpx camera phones in the 2008 global market.

Samsung BlackJack II Mobile Phone 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 OEMs 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.

Samsung BlackJack II Mobile Phone - Main PCB Bottom

Manufacturing Notes

Per iSuppli's Global OEM Manufacturing and Design Analysis (GOMDA), we estimate that Samsung to date still performs 100% of its handset manufacturing in-house.

Even with their Korean competitors, LG, they have only in recent years did LG start to use a number of Taiwanese ODMs for smart phones and low-cost GSM and CDMA phones, but this represents only a few percent of total production.

Country of Origin / Volume Assumptions

Based on markings, the unit was assembled in Korea. Furthermore, we have assumed that custom mechanicals (plastics, metals, etc.) were all sourced in lower labor rate country, China.

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), 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

The SGH-i617 has a total component count (less box contents) of 913 components, of which 102 are mechanical in nature. This seems well within the norms for a phone with this type of feature set.

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.

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.

Samsung BlackJack II Mobile Phone - Enclosure Disassembly

Design Notes

The overall design of this phone is basically a typical Qualcomm-based Samsung HSDPA phone plus an extra applications processor to handle the software needs. The SGH-i617's design is based on a core Qualcomm DBB (MSM6260 common to another model previously seen), and a TI applications processor (OMAP1710). Texas Instrument's OMAP1710 was the same Application Processor used in the previous generation of the Blackjack (SGH-i607). As is also often the case in previously analyzed Qualcomm-based models, the power management portion is handled by the Qualcomm PM6650 chip. The RF section is handled by 2 discrete Qualcomm RF chip (RFR6275 Tri-Band UMTS/HSDPA, RTR6275 Quad-Band GSM), and 3 PAM ( Anadigics AWT6223RM26P8 (Quad-Band GSM) and ACPM-7311-OR1 and ACPM-7331-OR1 (WCDMA)).

Baseband

Baseband - Qualcomm - MSM6260

MPU

Application Processor - Texas instruments - OMAP1710

Power Management

Power Management IC - Qualcomm - PM6650

Memory

MCP - Samsung Semiconductor - K5D1258DCA-A090000 - 512Mb NAND Flash + 256Mb Mobile SDRAM

MCP - Samsung Semiconductor - KAT00G00QM-D4YY - 1Gb OneNAND Flash + 512Mb Mobile SDRAM

SRAM - IDT - IDT70P258L55BYGI - 128Kb (8K x 16)

RF Transceiver

RF Receiver - Qualcomm - RFR6275 - Tri-Band UMTS/HSDPA

RF Transceiver - Qualcomm - RTR6275 - Quad-Band GMS/GPRS/EDGE

Power Amplifiers (PAM)

PAM (GSM) - Anadigics - AWT6223RM26P8 - Quad-Band GSM + WCDMA 2100

PAM (GSM) - Avago Technologies - ACPM-7311-OR1- WCDMA 850

PAM (GSM) - Avago Technologies - ACPM-7331-OR1- WCDMA 1900

User Interface

Bluetooth - CSR - BC41B143A06
Audio Codec - Wolfson Microelectronics - WM8753LGEFL/V

Display

2.4' Diagonal, 65K Color TFT, 240 x 320 Pixels

Camera Module

Primary - 2.0MP, CMOS, 1/4' Format, Fixed Lens

Samsung BlackJack II Mobile Phone - Box Contents