Hi, we've got the new Amazon Kindle Fire 199 us bucks worth of lost leading technology. You know what we say here on the Eev blog? Don't turn it on, take it apart. and of course I've already done a very lengthy review of this thing. Just click up here and uh, you can watch that uh review video This Ain't Going To be a review, it's going to be a tear down.

We're going to crack this sucker open and see what's inside and uh, see if it does have $199 us bucks worth of parts in it cuz it's supposed to be Kindle's new lost leader. And if you're wondering what the reflection is, that's my oscilloscope in. there's my camera. can check the hair again.

Hey Anyway, we're going to take the sucker apart. There are no uh, visible uh screws or anything. so it's obviously some sort of um, uh, form fit uh case or some sort of press fit case with the plastic. uh Clips the the retaining Clips around the outside.

That would be my guess. So we're going to use our spongy here and see if we can pry the case open along the outside of it. There, hey, heard a click there? There we go. We got our first click and there you go.

You can really see those uh Clips along there that you, uh, just sort of, uh, snap out as you go along and uh, we should have those on all the sides and it looks like it should, um, feels like it should just pop off. uh, fairly cleanly. There you go. That just popped off real easy.

That was, uh, as easy or even easier than the uh original? uh Kindle So as you can see, it's uh, pretty much exactly what we expected. We' got some shielding on the back of the case here, but uh, there were no, uh, sticky, um things actually like double-sided tape or anything else sticking it. Damn, we got a massive battery in here. That's where all your weight's going.

That's where all your 404 g a good lot of that is. uh, going into it's a lithium ion battery will go into that and a small PCB up here and that, that's probably uh, All She Wrote. And as with the Kindle there's the RFID tag. You can see the coil in there, which uh, which connects to the little uh chip inside.

Why don't you add an RFID tag like this to a product? You can do all sorts of versatile things that'll contain the serial number you can Jack during the production process and do a whole bunch of stuff. even after you've actually packaged the thing up. and you can see the conductive paint they've got on the uh case. Here, there's the there's the resistance of the normal ABS uh case.

It's nothing of course and if you measure the uh the shield in there, we go now. In addition to the uh spray on uh shielding stuff, which is pretty darn good, they've added this uh metal uh plate as well and they've got another uh metal plate uh shaped down the bottom here. and they've really gone to town on the shield into this and it's curious to note that they've deliberately left a little square of um, the case there unshielded and if you see where that actually lines up, it, uh, lines up pretty much, um, over this uh, flat Flex cable connector here and I'm not sure why they've left that little bit there unshielded I don't know, go figure. and the batter is a lithium ion polymer type of course.

Uh, 3.7 Vol So it's a single cell uh, 4,400 Milah uh 1628 W Nominal uh manufacturer I don't know. sort of unknown I Don't see uh, any marks in there, but uh, the cells are actually uh, made in China and the pack is processed in China And of course, having a single Um cell at 3.7 volts is much better than a multiple series connected uh pack because then you don't have any uh charge balance issues and the cell should, uh, last. A single cell should last a lot longer and and be more robust in terms of charge and misuse and that sort of thing than a series connected uh battery which has two or three cells in series. but uh, they can obviously power this whole thing from 3.7 volts.

I Mean there may be some DC to DC Converters on there to step it up and we'll just take out these battery connectors here. This looks like a little flip one. Yep, it is. so that, uh, should come out there.

We've uh, switched this uh thing off. we've done a hard, uh, switch off so that should be okay and we can. Oh, there we go. We can pull it out like that, that one's gone, and uh, this main battery one here looks like it can just push out eventually if we wiggle it out like that.

Now it seems like they've gone and, uh, really stuck this, uh, battery down under here. it's quite hard to, uh, prize out. I'm having a bit of difficulty. There's uh, seems to be lots of adhesion under there.

but if we take a look at the two battery connectors, then, um, obviously this one here is, um, clearly. uh, this one's clearly your power. There's your uh, Power and uh, well, your ground and your power there. and maybe some uh, sense lines for uh, temperature.

but uh, this connector here must be some sort of, um, I'm guessing some sort of um, uh, maybe ID And if you have a look in there, we're up to rev F of the PCB So they've gone through quite few spins of this board to get it just right. uh, presumably uh, manufacturing. um, you know, not so much development. Uh passes.

I Suspect there'd be a few manufacturing passes so that they can, uh, get their uh cost uh down and things like that because you often need to respin these boards because you might find another chip that's you know, slight. that's you know, 0.1 cents cheaper or something like that. When you're buying a couple of million of these things, it all adds up. so you can afford to respin the board a couple of times to optimize your uh, your uh, Parts uh cost and your bill of materials and things like that.

Let's flip up a few more of these connectors. once we've undone those screws there and flip it open Bingo What do we have? A quad flat pack on the Uh flat Flex uh board here? that? um, what's that presumably to uh Drive the LCD We'll take a closer look at that one. Well, it turns out that's actually a Ilite brand touchscreen controller a 2107 Qs1 K device and it looks like this Pham pad in here is, uh, covering a device under there I Can see it? Let's rip that off and see what's underneath. Well, that's rather interesting.

It turns out those pins weren't anything but an unpopulated expansion connector and we've got a BGA device under here. That's almost certainly the Uh Flash And up the top here. next to our wireless LAN device. We've got our Micro UFL Coax connector, so they're easy to, uh, pop off and get that out of the way so we should be able to.

uh, get that board out now and you can see that flat Flex uh board to board interface connector. they got there. Once you got that off. Uh, the board should just lift out.

it is stuck down by a bit of Gunk but uh, we should have no troubles. just Levering that board out and there's the back of the board. There's a few interesting things to note. Um, they've got some uh, silicon, uh, sticky silicon pad here to stick it down and uh, interestingly on the USB connector there, they've got some um, some some metallic, uh, mesh, uh cloth stuff which then mates down into the matching uh shielding, uh, metal down in there and it looks like it goes all throughout there.

on the base of that, right in. wow, they really, um, trying to, uh, just absolutely kill any problems with Um and EMC compliance and RFI and stuff like that. they've really tried to nail this one and underneath that silicon uh pad there, there's not really much of interest, just the uh, decoupling and a lot of um, unpopulated decoupling, um, parts and and other uh, passive type Parts under the Uh main, uh, under the main processor there and the main SRAM Now, let's take a look at the Uh main processor section here and you might thick. This is the main processor just by the sheer size of it.

but it ain't Here's the processor over here. it's a TI um, omap uh processor running at Uh 1 GHz it's a 4430 I I Believe it is. And the large device here is, um, a Hyx brand. Uh, that's your uh, that's your RAM memory.

That's 512 Mbes and there's not much else in there. Of course, a crystal oscillator by the looks of it. and uh, just some uh, power supply stuff surrounding the processor. and on the back side of that you got a whole bunch of passive uh Parts as well as we uh, saw before now.

um, they've actually got this in a metal uh can cuz it's uh, quite high frequency. all the stuff in there because you have to have a parallel uh bus running between these things. and you know when you get a, uh, you know, a very fast processor like that with a with a big parallel bus in there you need some shielding. They haven't put the shielding on the top because that's taken care of by by the uh case.

Now all these gold, uh pads here. All these um, little donut pads. They of course all of course are test points for the bed of nails uh tester or the flying probe tester that they use. When they Mass assemble these Pcbs, they got to have some way to test them some way to program them.

So uh, you can bet they're unlabeled of course. But uh, they, they know exactly what they do when they set up these jigs. They don't need to label them on the silk screen not that there's really any room to label them on the silk screen anyway, but you can bet your bottom dollar some of those in there would be the Uh JTAG uh interface to actually program the Omap um and test and program the Omap processor. And over here we have our Micron brand uh, flash memory I don't know the number, but that would be the 8 Gabes of Flash and that device in there is a Texas Instruments uh, Lvds 83b, uh uh bus, uh transmitter and on the bottom of the board here.

once again, Texas Instruments They love Texas instruments. They probably got a really sweet deal. uh, buying millions of TI parts of various types. Anyway, this is a TV 320, AIC 310 uh low power audio codec and it's got a 1.3 W um class D uh amplifier as well.

that's for driving the headphone jack and the Uh speakers. and there's a couple of other miscellaneous Uh devices scattered around here. One of them will be like a a Power Management controller and they're probably a few little uh transceiver uh ic's scattered around the place as well. but uh, apart from that, it is, um, surprisingly minimal.

and this tiny little uh BGA uh package down in here will be U some sort of uh, battery management, uh controller power, uh, controller or something like that handling the battery. It's a dead giveaway cuz it's right next to the power input connector and in general, there's quite a few unpopulated uh Parts on this board. especially this connector down here. I Not sure what's doing, uh down at that connector, but we've seen these sort of missing Uh components and missing connectors on Amazon products before.

and of course, we have our Wi-Fi uh chipset down here, which is a Uh Georgian uh, WG 7310. And of course, what's interesting is that they've gone for a double-sided Uh load as opposed to the single-sided load which we saw on the third generation Kindle tear down. and what's the significance of that? Well, it costs a uh, it costs more to actually assemble a double-sided load like this. and it takes longer to assemble because you've got to actually, uh, put your boards uh, through, at least, uh, twice through the pick and place machine to, uh, assemble the components on there.

And if you were shooting for the lowest absolute Rock Bottom possible price, then you're trying to avoid um, designing a double-sided load board at all cost, really. And I've taken off the screws for the Uh speaker assembly and you can see that here they've got uh, the the two speakers either side there. Not terribly. uh, exciting.

Uh, some more exciting stuff is the Uh WiFi antenna on the top of the Uh case here. Once again, you can see strapping here for the shielding. Now there's one thing I didn't see on here and that was the Uh accelerometer for the uh uh sens in. So I reckon that must be this little Uh board down here with this ribbon cable going out here and um I think it looks like that's what this is over here.

So um, this this one up here. so I wasn't uh I was incorrect that that actually went to the battery. It looks like that goes under the battery somehow and ends up at this board down here and it looks like we can get the uh basic uh frame out by undoing five um screws around here. Let's see if we can pop it out and it looks like this just lifts out.

Yep, there we go. Once you cut that uh shield in tape that's holding down that and uh, bingo. Be careful of the antenna. uh cable.

you can take that out. but there you go. There you go. It doesn't look like an accelerometer board.

it looks like uh, some sort of light uh sensor which goes through the uh front panel. Now why it? actually go to all the trouble to have a separate uh PCB for that, put it up right in that corner, have the uh cable going right under the battery over you got connectors and extra cost and stuff. Why you couldn't have engineered that to put that on the main board? I Don't know. And there's the LCD display manufactured by LG and if I'm not mistaken, that's uh, almost the exact same display used in the Barnes & Noble Nook uh 7-in tablet.

So it looks like LG have cornered the market. There you see that the batter is not one cell, but two separate Uh cells and they'd be uh, they'd be paralleled up with some circuitry on there to um handle the shared load and the shared charging. and each one's 7.7 W hours at nominal 3.7 vol. So there you go.

That's the Uh tear down. Not too many uh, major surprises in all that. I guess um I was expecting, say a single-sided Load Board to try and uh, keep that, uh, cost down. but uh, there's no sort of uh, looks like very few, if any Uh custom Uh parts are all off the shelf Uh packages, all commercially available.

uh, Cots as they call it commercially available off the shelf devices. Uh, no surprises at at all. Uh, they get the cost down by pure Uh bargaining power. They' actually Um, system engineered this thing uh, quite well.

I'm quite impressed with the Uh system engineering of it and the Flack Flex Uh cables and the Border board inconnect. I I Can't help but think that in quite a few places, they could have, um, optimized the Uh cost a bit more. They could have cut some more corners. Um, but uh, they've gone obviously gone through quite a few, uh, quite a few spins of the Uh PCB and probably the Um, uh, all of the mechanical uh stuff as well.

There'd be quite a few spins involved in that before they actually got production uh, units out the door, but they've done a really good job. So my hats off to Uh, the design team that have designed the Uh Kindle Fire. It's quite nice I like it for and it looks like it still works. We're Kindle firing.

it's firing up. haven't put the back on. but uh yeah, Touchcreen works. Ah, sweet as beautiful.

And if you like my videos, don't forget to subscribe. There's a subscribe uh link after this visit E Blog.com and if you want to chat about electronics and technical stuff, the best place to do it is the EV Blog Electronics Engineering Community Forum Check it out Eev Blog.com forum and it's got countless users on there who chat about everything to do with electronics. You name it, it's on there. catch you later.