Hi, it's product tear down time again and we got another Kindle you know I Love the Kindle You know? I've torn down a few of them previously and reviewed them. Oh, we've got the new Kindle paper white. so it's got the new uh LED backlight on the thing so you can read it at night. Terrific.

Not too many changes from the regular um from the previous Kindle uh touch. Really? apart from the paper white uh display they call it which has the LED backlight on it should be interesting. Let's tear this sucker down, See what's inside? let's go now. as for taking this thing apart, it does appear to be, uh, somewhat different to previous generation.

Kindles in that the back here you'll notice has no split along the edge so the back case looks like it does not lift off anymore. it. uh, that's totally changed because if we look at the uh, the Kindle Touch you can see that the back panel there can easily lift off. And of course the first generation Kindle I've done a tear down.

You just go around the edge and uh, you can lift off the back panel like that. but this new one is. the new paper white is significantly different so it looks like we're going to have to lift off this front bezel cuz your Edge is actually on the front and what that means. if you're not really careful with your spudger going around the outside, you're going to be left with some pretty horrible marks around the edge.

and yeah, no doubt I'll probably goof it up and leave a few marks on it, but let's give it a go. Okay, I'll use my plastic spudger this time. um, instead of my metal one. so let's give it a go.

Let's start over here and see if I can dig into this sucker and get this panel off. Could be a bit tricky. Uh, let me try and start this without the camera in the way and see if I can get a foothold in there camera is just a bit awward award being in the way here. Well my plastic one didn't really cut the mustard there so I managed to get my metal one under there and it does seem to be have some adhesive on it so going to have to be pretty careful.

We'll work our way around this thing. and uh so yeah, it's a bit tricky this one. it's got little seems to have little dabs of adhesive all the way along. Got to be careful not to damage the display in there I guess poking in too far.

so yeah, this could take a bit. You should be able to see that adhesive in there. It really is a pain in the butt to try and get this thing off. I've got another plastic spudgy? Yeah! Check.

Check that out. Look at that a horrible stuff man. H previous Kindles were much easier to get open than this one. This is messy so that top bit along there is really Troublesome it's really stuck down quite well.

the sides really just pop straight off and I presume the bottom here is going to be the same pain in the butt as I Don't know, it's not. It's not as bad. the Bottom's not as bad, but ah, this is just horrid. Tada We're almost there.

Almost there. Oh no. I'll let it stick again. There it is.

And we have a date code on the back of the front panel bezel here the 21st of the 9th 2012. That's almost exactly 3 weeks ago, and that includes uh, shipping and everything like that. So there you go. It's pretty darn recent.

I'm not sure if that's a manufacturer uh, date code for the front panel bezel or whether or not it was manufactured before that and this was the Uh assembly date code or something like that. perhaps. um, most likely the manufacturing date code though, and it looks like to get access to the rest of it and lift it out. We got a whole bunch of phetz head screws around here, so let's have a crack at those and the whole assembly should just lift out.

Well, it's not coming out so I suspect there's a hidden screw up under there little bastard. There's a couple of uh Clips down the bottom here, so obviously this outer housing here actually is that a like a magnesium housing or something? I'm not sure, but that uh uh Clips in under those two clips there. so clearly uh, it's sort of leave it in down like that and put down and then looks like we got a final screw under there. Only one way to find out.

Let's get the let's get the knife out. have a look: TDA little mongr nothing in the back of it. No, that's it. Taada, We're in and if we have a look at the back of the case here, they've uh, spared no expense.

Of course they have the RFID uh tracking tag which they can use for for production. uh, tracking. It'll have a serial number, a unique ID identifier buildin, they can track it during production and stuff like that and all metal threaded inserts in there. Beautiful.

Good to see. They've really spared no expense. And here's the passive RFID tag. and it's passive because it doesn't have a battery in it.

it. uh, actually. uh gets generates a voltage from the antenna here and poers the chip inside which then REM modulates it and can send data out. I Have no idea what the 29 31 is a product code or some uh type of the device and you can see the tiny little chip in there.

It'll probably have like a little serial number or something embedded in it and that's about it. And we have another date code Inkjet or something printed on the inside of the case here. 24th of the 9th 2012 Only like you know. Less Than 3 weeks ago and the first thing I noticed about the PCB is that there's hardly any unshielded circuitry.

There's a tiny amount up there. there's one chip on that flat Flex board there by the looks of it. couple of passives or something around here, but everything else is under metal shielded cans. They're really knocking, um, any issues with Uh RFI right on the head, right there.

And if we take a look at the battery here, it is Amazon Kindle brand branded manufactured in Japan and it's a model number: MC 345, 7503, 142 Milah Uh, it's a single cell of course. 5.25 W nominal Lithium Polymer And of course it uh, looks fairly easy to replace just a couple of screws. I'll have some um, uh, PCB uh, spring terminal contacts under there and it'll just lift off I Like it, but they really could have gone for a larger battery if they so desired and really kicked the battery life out of the park. They could have filled up this entire area with a massive battery.

Huge, we would have you know, at least doubled the capacity or something like that, perhaps. but increased cost, increased weight. It's all a trade-off. and on the bottom edge of the board, you'll notice they've gone to all the trouble to have a little flat Flex uh cable there just to have the uh little tactile Dome switch for the power switch and then they've gone over to an SMD header over there and well, you know they've got into quite a bit of trouble there.

It's nicely engineered, but maybe expense they didn't need. They could have used a right angle tack switch perhaps on the board, maybe embedded into the board if they cut out a little bit of the board or something like that. Perhaps, um, could have lowered their cost a bit more there, but that's well engineered and right next to that, they've got an unpopulated footprint there. I'm not sure what's going on there.

it's uh, maybe some sort of, um, uh, soft power latching button chip or some sort of reset chip I Don't know, but they've decided to leave it off cuz there's not much in the way of IO on that thing. so really, who knows. And this rubber thing here, believe it or not, is the LED There it is shines out the bottom there, and uh, that is sort of clipped onto the underside of the board as well. so it's sort of SL slides on over and why they've done that? I've got no idea.

and the little micro USB connector here has a tiny little BGA chip there I can't quite see that I'll have to look under the times 10 microscope to get that another little bit of pad in here. that's uh, just I don't know. maybe uh, stopping the case or something like that, pressing down and a couple of tiny little passives and they're they look like 02 01s or thereabouts Ultra tiny and actually this Trace here is very curious. Look at that.

There's like an AC coupling cap there and that and these look like resistors. Just a couple of series resistors here. I Have no idea what that's doing. It almost looks like it's a controlled impedance Trace that would go to an antenna, but that's and there's that little BGA chip AAC 98v 139 I Have no idea what that one is Now somewhat curiously on this, this flat Flex cable going over to the PCB we have a macronix.

uh MX 25u 435 and that reason I say rather curiously is because that is a 4 megabit serial flash chip. What's it actually doing on the flat Flex cable there? your guess is as good as mine. Now here is the magic of the paper white display. It looks like we've got couple LEDs along the bottom here which uh, light into this uh diffusion film here which then goes over the entire top of the screen and that as apparently there's a lot of Technology that's gone into that um into that film into that diffusion type film.

uh that makes this thing give complete even light all all over the entire screen. and the LEDs are ultra low. Uh, power. Ultra high efficiency.

uh LEDs as well that give the incredibly low power consumption so this thing can get many weeks of battery life with the display. backlight I Guess well, you know, still call it a backlight even though it's more like a front light here. um, display and you can see them lit up here. There they are four LEDs which light up and then give a completely even display.

I mean look, you can't even see any shadowing in there at all. maybe slightly on the screen, but in real life here with my eyes I can barely see any shadowing on that down that bottom at all and that it looks like, um, it looks like they might have something LEDs up the top as well. but I don't think so I just think that's a light coming out of the diffusion layer and Trav traveling all the way through and just popping out the other end there so it looks like it's lit somehow up the top, but that's just the light coming all the way through. It's really quite neat and these leads are, actually, um, quite bright here in the lab.

I'll see if I can capture that on camera and I've completely switched the lights off in the lab here so all I've got is uh, some incidental light coming from uh, through the glass, uh windows at the side of the office plus my exit sign and wow, that is really bright. I'm not sure what this is set to, but jeez, this really lights up. and of course if you put your hand over that and you don't actually see that cuz these are incred, very blinding. but if you don't see them, that display is just beautiful in the dark.

I Love it! So let's go in and find out what uh level this thing is set to. We'll bypass all the Wi-Fi crap and there you go. It's set to almost maximum by default out of the box and we can increase that and decrease that right down to that's the absolute lowest. So even at the absolute lowest setting there, it's still on so there doesn't appear to be actually be an option to turn it off there.

So I Guess they've uh, done the calculations that the current draw from the leads right at the absolute minimum is absolutely negligible. Go figure. The other thing is I Can't really see any flicker on there at all as well I can see it certainly stepping through that brightness. but on camera shooting this at, uh, 25 frames per second, there's no Pwm flicker on that at all.

So maybe they're not Pwm in that they've actually got an adjustable constant current through all those LEDs But I Really like that. That is neat and it is, so even on the display, it's absolutely incredible. I Found something rather curious. Check this out.

The Kindle has turned off at the moment, but I was just pointing around here and I can make this thing switch on. Watch this. Hang on. It was there we go look.

I Just switched on the Kindle go figure. Switch it off. There we go. it's off and I can.

maybe if I yeah if I touch that part of the circuitry which is, um, part of the LED driver circuitry around there. it switches the Kindle on. go figure because there's a there's a little four pin device down in there with a cap and there's a little what 0402 resistor or something like that. but yeah, look that is just.

it's all over the place. when I get near that with my metallic screwdriver. Oy look I wasn't even near it and it switched on. There's something really weird going on there.

Let me. uh, switch this. That little T switch is hard to hard to get switch it off again. No, it's not.

my finger's not doing anything there. but uh I am able to make the damn thing switch on with I screws driver if I don't touch it. So I'm not imparting any 50 HZ directly onto the hey there we go I Touched the LED bang straight on. Weird.

Now these four. LEDs here they are actually uh mounted on this flat. Flex this white flat Flex uh cable over here and if you look on the back here it, that's where it uh connects to there and you can just pop that off. you just lift it off.

It's just got one of those uh little uh board to board interconnect connectors with the flat Flex cable there and that plugs in and I can prove that by now switching it on. and uh, we're getting no LEDs at all. but if we connect it Bingo our LEDs are on. So clearly this little bit of circuitry down in here is the LED driver.

probably some sort of uh, programmable constant current driver and there it is. up close. There's a little uh, six pin chip there with a cap it looks like a diode there, and another cap and a couple of resistors or inductors and a big inductor there. and that's about all she wrote for that lead driver, and of course the magic with this new display here.

Let me switch it on too easy. I can just touch that point down there I Love it. Uh is the evenness of this backlight here. But it's not a backlight, it's actually a front light.

It's a nano uh, imprinted uh, diffusion film that sits on the very top of the device here with the capacitive uh touch layer underneath that, and then the eink display under that. again with so it's actually reflecting the light downwards. so it travels out of the LEDs into the diffusion layer, spreads it all out, and then points it downwards into the screen and then reflects back out so it's not pointing directly into your eyes so you don't get any fatigue from reading this thing. It's absolutely brilliant and Amazon themselves liken it to basically a flattened out, uh, fiber optic cable.

but that's a pretty crude uh description of it. really. there's you know, a lot more into into it than that as far as the dispersion of the light inside and then directing it, uh, downwards. Very advanced technology I Love it.

and if we try and get a closeup of it in there, you can see the layer there and it's it seems to be. there's a bit of giving that, so it seems to be some sort of polycarbonate polycarbonate material. And but it's not just, you know, a sheet of clear polycarb. it's much more advanced than that.

It's nano imprinted as they say, and that uh, is there's some magic happening in there, some black magic and that's uh, causing the light to veryy quickly once it gets out of this Led. If we try and switch it on here, can we can we switch it on? I Was able to switch it on before. hang on using the wrong screwdriver. Let's see there, there we go.

it's on. There we go. I Got it and it very quickly diffuses out. I Mean it goes in there so you can see it.

Bright hot spot around there. but really? after that, it's uh, it just, you know, completely diffuses and there's no hotpots in the display at all. Fantastic. So my hat is off to the design team at Kindle or their uh subsidiary that uh, designed this.

My hats off to them. They've done a superb job in getting this uh uh, light diffusion technology working and on this part of the board. Here, this looks mysteriously like a Micro SD card connector footprint that's designed to poke out the side of the case or maybe not cuz it's probably not near enough to the side of the case to do that. and the footprint actually seems wrong.

There's eight eight pins there, but um, it just doesn't look right. There's only three of them actually wired up. Let's say if this is yeah, if this is pin one here, 1, three, four five, and pin six and pin two there is ground now on a standard uh micro SD card I believe. The pin uh six is normally ground I believe and up on this part of the board.

Here they've gone to all the trouble to Route it all around like this and around there and they've put this J1 connector there and they haven't populated that at all. Once again, very few signals actually go into the pins of that connector. So what that one's doing? and a couple of little Associated devices there little so 23 and other things. um I have no idea and there's just more unpopulated Footprints Here there's another connector here which is going off somewhere doing something and there's another one here.

Go figure now. Unfortunately, all of these metal cans here are solded down onto the PCB so they would be a real dog to get off. and I unfortunately I do want to actually uh, keep this Kindle and use it So sorry folks. I'm not going to be taking those Um cans off to see what processor and other stuff is used under there H I'd like to, but you know it's probably not that much different.

um from the original um Kindle from the previous uh Kindle Touch and that would likely be the free scale IMX 508 same as what's used in The Touch that's an Arm Cortex A8 processor with a a built-in Eink display driver specifically designed for Um Eink readers like this. and we've got a flat Flex cable here which you can just lift the lever and pop that out. It's got a driver on there, it's got a uh a barcode on the top there so I can't uh, get it that chip number but that just pops off. so we'll pop off all these and we'll uh, take this board off I Don't expect there to be anything on the bottom I Expect it to be a single sided load board, but we'll take a look anyway.

Let's take the rest of the screws off. Aha, the battery here has an I Squ C bus. there it is and SDA so that's probably got uh, some sort of ID chip in it and it probably may not work without. um, the Uh without if it doesn't detect that that IDs there it may not power up H Let's try it all right.

Let's actually measure the standby current draw here with my microcurrent I've got that on uh, microamp range so M volts will equal microamps and let's measure the standby consumption. Uhoh folks, something's gone horribly wrong. Repair needed your Kindle needs repair. Please contact Kindle Customer Service What Fail No, it's all good.

There you go. it's booting up I Replaced the Uh battery on the back so clearly um, that's what must happen if you try and power this thing from a battery that, uh, it doesn't have the um the chip on the I Squ C bus so there you go. can't just power it from any Source you would have to, uh, reverse. if you wanted to, uh hack a bigger battery in it, you'd have to, uh, reverse engineer the Um I Squ C chip in there.

so I'd love to be able to measure the uh LED uh power consumption in various Uh modes and all that sort of stuff. but ah no, it's a bit too much. uh trouble I'd really have to uh hack this thing a fair bit to try and uh, do that. but anyway I've taken the main board out and not much doing on the back as I said single-sided load that lowers their component, their manufacturing cost, and their manufacturing time as well.

And you can see all the Uh isolated Uh Power planes around there for the various Uh core voltages. And there's various Uh test points around for the bed of Nails test system. uh, ah and I was right about this Trace here being a controlled impedance trace for the antenna I Forgot all about the Wi-Fi functionality of this. There's a reason why it's obvious now.

uh, why they've removed all the Copper from the top side there because Tada on the bottom side of the board there is your Wi-Fi antenna and they've got a matching one on the other side there as well. And if you're curious to see underneath that rubber for the LED T it's just holding in place a little light pipe there to uh get the light from the LED which is much further back in there through to evenly lit on the front ah, standard stuff. and on the bottom of the micro USB connector there you can see the conductive adhesive shielding braid to help with the Emi and if you check out the bottom of the case here, you can actually well the underside of the Uh front of the case. Anyway, you can see the metal shield in braid stuck onto there.

There's the Uh that's might might even be a magnesium uh plastic um case on the thing, but they've added the extra Uh shielding braid on there, which is why they've left exposed all the copper on the bottom of the board here. If you're wondering why there's copper, the exposed gold there is because it matches up. Look at that. It matches up with that.

So it effectively forms an RF shielding can for all of the Power planes underneath there. just like you'd see in a tear down of a spectrum analyzer. for example, like the RF Seum section of a spectrum analyzer. So they' really, they the people who designed this really know what they're doing and really wanted to absolutely nail any Emi RF interference, uh issues Totally on the head for any country in the world.

Any compliance standard they've they just absolutely nailed it with this thing. I Mean you can't do much better than that. Especially in like, aund you know how much you know. $120 $150 consumer item? You know, you're kidding me.

And they really want to push this board down. actually squeeze it down. That's why they've got these little metal caps to go over there like that and the screw goes down into the threaded metal insert into the molded housing down there and pushes down the board with that metal cap. It's brilliant.

So everything in here is effectively shielded inside a faraday cage each. uh, separate, uh element of the Uh system design. It's got its own Uh Faraday shielded can on there. the power plane underneath that that connect them all and bind the whole system together.

Sounds like the force? Um, they effectively, uh because they're pushed down with these uh, capped screws here, effectively forming one big Faraday cage on the bottom of the board to stop any, uh, sideways leakage from the power ples. Ah, beautiful stuff. I Bet the system designers of this thing when they had to go for their uh, uh, compliance testing, they probably didn't even bother with pre-compliance testing. They went ah, we're going to balls this one in.

they probably did. And tiny little attention to detail stuff. They've probably decided that, oh, look, we need a little bit of extra support on the board right down in this bottom corner. So they've got the metal threaded insert down in there with this little custom aluminium plate there to sort of hold the edge of the board down.

I Mean that actually might be a cludge after woods? they may have laid out the board and go. Oh look, we need to support it a bit more here, but we don't want to respin the board and you know, probably have to get a compliance tested again or something. So maybe they uh, did a last minute thing of just oh, that's it. We can change it in the housing, we'll just add a thing there, add a plate, and ah, Bob's your uncle so that's a little Peak inside the new Kindle paper white eBook reader I Really like it.

There's some nice technology in there. The construction bill quality is absolutely awesome. sorry I couldn't get into those uh cans there I Don't want to destroy this thing, but uh, and there's nothing under the display there. uh, perhaps the part number for the uh manufacturer? the display at best? Maybe.

But anyway, it's a rather interesting tear down and the construction and system design of this thing is really. First Rate They've put a lot of effort not only into the electronic side, the RFI uh shielding the construction, the design of this thing, and the beautiful new Uh light guide diffusion technology. Absolutely fantastic. My hats off to the design team I Really like it.

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