Hi welcome to Tear down! Tuesday Yes, everyone loves some vintage classic consumer technology and nothing beats an old motor roller flip microtac phone from 20 years ago 1994 vintage. the Motorola International 7200 I've had this one for uh, quite some time was sent in to my mailbag segment by Thomas Sandy so thank you very much Thomas just getting around to it ready Ro Charger Look at that. You can have two the phone or a second or two battery packs on charge in this sucker. Ah, flip.

So we're one step up from the old uh Gordon Gecko Brick which I've uh, torn down before which I'll link in down below if you haven't seen that. one of those Brick Mobile uh, once again a Motorola cuz Motorola owned the market back then. but this little microtac beauty. it's actually quite, uh, small and lightweight.

relative um to The Brick phones anyway, and you know, certainly very, quite usable. Uh, you could certainly like, you know, put it in Overcoat pocket or something like that. you can't slip it into your jeans pocket barely. But geez, this was pretty state of the-art for the day.

Um, early models were analog. Of course this is the Gsm1 from 1994 900 MHz uh International GSM Model TW line um LCD display. The earlier ones had the lead display on them I think it's uh, two lines by 12 character display and the battery just uh, slides out of this sucker like that and Tada there it is. nickel metal hydrate as I said, you could have a couple on uh charge there and this is what we're looking at.

a SE International 7200 model and uh yeah, I do believe it is like 94 vintage I believe that's probably the date uh, there 9426 or 26 week? uh, 94. So this is the GSM model. Got an interface down here? that's probably for a handsfree, uh car kit I Don't remember the exact uh accessories for this uh sucker. So you were pretty hot stuff back in 1994.

If you whipped out your phone and flipped it open and pulled up the antenna and started talking to someone that was incredibly unusual to uh, see back then, um, you know everyone has a mobile phone these days. a smartphone. They're engrossed in it. But back then it was a really, really big deal.

and uh, you had to be a big deal to have one of these things. Really, So Well, yeah, certainly. I didn't have one back in uh, 1993, 1994, that's for sure. So this thing was pretty much, uh, you know, the model for all you know flip phones to come.

That sort of flip phone form factor although you know it's the keypad doesn't uh, flip down of course. I mean you know they could have easily just done away with this uh, flippy part and just had it like like that, but it just looked neat and tidy and you didn't accidentally. you know, press the power on and stuff like that cuz these things didn't have a huge battery life. It's not like you get a weak standby out of this thing.

So uh, yeah, just having that flap over there. um, keeps your uh, keypad from getting bumped and there's a couple of volume uh controls on the side and well, not much else. There's that sliding switch there I'm not sure what that does, is that the main power switch? I Don't know. This sucker doesn't work so or at least it's not, uh, powered up.

Batter's not holding any charge. so let's crack this sucker open. Now of course, we're going to see a lot of uh, surface mount, uh, stuffing. It'll be, well, all surface mount.

um, essentially. really. I'd be very surprised if there's any through hole stuff in there at all, but nothing like the system integration you get. Uh, these days you know there'll be, uh, separate, you know, RF and analog, um, uh, sections.

A lot of that. There'll be some basic processing, but these things were, you know, reasonably simple compared to, uh, the complexity in even just a, you know, a simple, modern, uh, mobile phone. They wouldn't have been running some, you know, major operating system or anything like that. Um, really.

just you know, an typical, uh, purpose designed embedded firmware product. So let's try and crack this thing open. I Don't see any screws on it, so it's probably like a press fit around the outside here. so maybe if we, hey there we go.

H Could be too easy, we'll find out. And of course, Motorola uh, being as huge as they are, probably rolled a lot of the chips uh, themselves for this sucker so that wouldn't surprise me at all to see. you know, um, a real buttload of Motorola Parts in this thing and I see one main circuit board down there? I Can see some tandems already, some SMD tandems, but uh, yeah, I'm not entirely sure I Me Maybe have to get in there and sort of prize out those clips or something like that. perhaps.

Let me give me a minute to work on this sucker. One little sneaky torque screw under there and that's about it. Taada. and yeah, lots of heavy shielding and we're in like Flynn and no real surprises at all.

Exactly what you'd expect to see. you know, lots of RF stuff we've got looks like a, uh, like the uh receiver, you know, the transceiver uh, module up here, and heavy shielding everywhere. pretty much else. It looks like it's a single board, uh, construction.

It's going to be double-sided uh, populated of course. but yeah, heavy shielding on most of it. As I said, there's not a huge amount of system integration in terms of the um, you know the RF uh processing, uh, side of things, so you know they it's You know, these days it's just, you know, single chip, off the shelf, whatever the you know. But back then you had to have all this stuff in it shielded.

Cannon Well, really messy kind of business. but uh, that's what you dealt with back in 1994. Now one of the interesting aspects of this is the antenna. If we take a look along there, we can see that, uh, you know, the antenna goes inside that, but it's you know, it's just this plasticky heap of crap if we have a look at the uh, the plastic, uh, mounting clip.

for all this, we can see what's really going on here. I Mean there's this uh coil here, which is clearly the antenna it's got It's coming in here and then it's just wrapped around like that. We've got, you know, half a dozen uh turns or so and there you go. If you cut open that plastic antenna which isn't directly uh coupled to the other uh coil, you can, uh, see that it is Actually there is a Um spiral in there.

So it is a passively coupled Um antenna so it sits inside there. There's no direct, uh, direct connection at all inside there, but it, uh, it's It's obviously good enough. So why they made the decision to uh, do that? I Mean you know it's you're not going to get the best performance out of that thing, but maybe, um, you know it was. It was good enough and and it was robust and everything like that cuz there's no direct connection to break and uh, stuff like that.

as long as the antenna doesn't physically pull out, they're uh, they're going to get that uh, coupling system to work. As you know, inefficient as it might be. I Don't know if anyone knows the actual you know, uh, efficiency of something of a coupled antenna like that at 900? MHz Please share the data and there's our transceiver module in there. You can see the trace there with the cap going down the ground and there's our output socket there.

and there's the main exposed chip outside of the metal work, so that wouldn't be part of the RF uh section at all. So some sort of processor I don't know, can't find any info on it. the XC 391 76 from Motorola and will no doubt find more Motorola Parts in this thing. So I don't know if anyone does have any uh data on this, uh, ancient device, then please let us know.

So let's try and uh, pop off. all these shielding cans should be able to I Can see the uh, little Clips down in there and that's underneath the shielded can there and we have a secondary shielder caned underneath that. So whatever is under there, some sort of oscillator maybe? uh, pretty darn important. Yes, another two uh, Motorola branded Parts there.

once again, no idea what those things are. Um, then we have some sort of looks like some sort of hybrid module down in here. I Don't know. some sort of uh, filter or um, filter package or oscillator or something like that.

not really sure date code of course gives this thing away 38th week. uh, 94 so certainly is 94 vintage, but another can up there to get these off. I'm actually going to have to get the iron out and uh, physically remove those cans. so I may actually do that.

but we've got some. you know, some RF transistors and uh, some inductors and other uh, passive stuff around there, but got ourselves a nice little uh PCB inductor in there. You can see that. Beautiful once again.

no idea what that part is. Got some more Tanum, some more RF transistors around there. Anyone got a circuit diagram for this thing, right? We'll get this top board out here. I've prized it out and today we do have a dual board solution.

But oh, look at all the goodness we've missed on the bottom here. So what have we got here? Well, no major surprises. uh main, uh, processor? Well, microcontroller here. MC 68300 series which is a variant of the famous Motorola 68,000 microprocessor.

except you know this one's designed for uh, more embedded applications like this. It's uh, I don't even think it's uh, you can get it anymore I think it's Legacy They've deprecated that we've got a couple of uh 4 megabit uh flash eoms up here. Yes, uh eoms. They're actually.

well, they're actually not erasable. They're are pro onetime programmable uh ROMs So there's two 4 Meg bit one there. uh, 64k bit one there. We got ourselves two 32k by 8 um srams here.

So that is the basic uh control application. So I'm not sure what this sucker uh, was doing over here that we saw on the top I mean clearly it's not a, you know, major processing function. There's hardly any traces actually connected to that one in there, so maybe it's some sort of battery management um, uh, device or something like that I don't know. and a bit further down bog standard 4051 from Motorola of course cuz Motorola do all your standard uh 74 and 4,000 series uh, logic of course.

always have no idea what this uh part over here is. If you've got any info on it, please let everyone know this. Mc47 DW though this is an 8 to 10bit single slope, not dual slope uh, analog to digital uh converter. So there you go.

Then we've got a large AT&T part down in here. Can't get anyo on that. No idea, Probably you know something. you know the GSM uh type part of it.

something uh, to do with the protocol or something like that, perhaps? um, this one. Don't know. we'll have to whip some rubber off there. and then we have ourselves a uh PCM codec filter here.

the MC 14548 DW we've got a data sheet on that I'll link that in uh down below and once again, that's a 5vol part and that's what you'll get with all these parts. All 5V technology. None of this 3.3v rubbish. And under that rubber, we have ourselves another undecipherable Motorola chip.

and we got it. Looks like I don't know. a regulator or a transistor over here. big ass, uh, diode.

some big ass tanms around here, and uh, not much else. whole bun of bunch of miscellaneous, uh, passive stuff. This would have been, of course, at least a four layer uh board on this thing. you know, uh, reasonably? Advanced um.

manufacturing technology for its day. All this stuff. But the thing is, this is why you can see that Motorola practically owned the market back then. you know we're talking Motorola uh processes.

They've got their own Motorola digital logic. They've got the you know, analog to digital inverters. We've got the uh filtering happening over here. They've got all the other uh, you know chipset, um, integrated, um uh type stuff happening over here here here all over the shop.

Imagine if you know you tried to compete with Motorola producing their phones, you'd probably have to get these off the shelf chips. and well, you couldn't get them at the same price as Motorola. So that's why they practically own the market. The most interesting thing here, of course is the AT&T uh chipset down there.

Did AT&T make their own uh chipsets back then? or was it just uh, you know, did they design it have a say in it? uh, who actually manufactured it? what? Foundry was it I don't know. Back on the uh, topside RF stuff Again, this package in here is probably a saw filter would be my guess at the uh, very least. right near the uh front end. We'll have to pop this can here off.

but uh, once again, we got another Motorola part in there and a whole bunch of uh RF um stuff where yeah there we got ourselves an inductor there. you can see that actually wound on the former. there. here we go I pop the hood on this can and this is rather interesting.

Take a look at this. I mean you know we've got some uh RF Voodoo going on down under here and look, we've got a some sort of uh D Bond attachment over there on these parts. Over here, these multiple bonds across this part which is sort of, um, sunk into the PCB like that. So these look for all the world like you know RF power transistors and they're mounting them and they've like you know, done them like individual uh di like on these um, little alum blocks which probably couple the heat out to the bottom side of the board there and they've done those a couple of times.

That's why you can see uh, three connections on there. There's one pad, two pads, three pads and same over here. So they individual RF power transistors and the multiple Bond wires. Um, you know, higher current, uh, lower inductance or the usual uh Jazz that you would, uh, put in multiple Bond wires for.

So that's the best guess of what's actually going on there. Or that could be like a parallel um, block of uh Power transistors? perhaps? something like that. They're actually paralleling them up to get the extra uh Power out of them. perhaps.

But um, if anyone has some uh, you know, solid, um, you know, data on exactly what they doing there, then uh, please share it. uh, that sort of stuff. Please let us know, because that folks is fascinating technology right there. And we've got another D Bond attachment just jumping across there to that sort of, you know, ceramic pad there.

And there's the other little. There's the other business going on in there. I Mean, we've obviously got uh, you know, your regular, sort of, you know, PCB based, uh, distributed element filtering going on in there, actually creating the Uh components with the Pcbs like that? In fact, hang on. Look, you can actually see the bond wire jumping across those pads in the solder mask.

So look, they, they haven't just relied on the classic distributed element filter on the PCB They've had to bond, wire, jump all of that stuff. So what on Earth is going on there? I Mean, you know we're probably going to see some classic hair pin. No, there's no hair pin filters or anything like that, but basically regular distributed element uh filter Construction in here. but all the intricacies of the bond wires and how they've tacked those over I Guess this was very early.

uh, work on distributed uh element filters by the way. I Forgot to point out the uh ground um system as part of this antenna as well. Actually, uh, extends out like that on this. uh um.

Well, it's not a a fiberglass uh board. it's probably some sort of. you know, it looks like some sort of Teflon board or or some other material. I Mean, there's a solid ground plane on the bottom with some Vas going across there.

but uh, and it's sort of wedged of course, and it's uh, sandwiched in the other in the main board like that. so that's rather neat so that forms that that stub. There forms part of the antenna system as well as the Central Point down in there. It's not just your regular ground and I've taken the metal end cap off.

What? I thought was some sort of, you know, uh, shielded Dart Block but it's not. It's actually a uh dialectric Um filter. This is a big block of dialectric material I'm not sure exactly uh what and then they actually use these cavities which go through to the other side. Like that you can see the V's popping out the well holes popping out the other side.

they actually use those as uh, resonant cavities in the dialectric material I mean you can see the um, you know, the uh distributed element uh kind of filter work going on the Uh top of the dialectric material up here. but they use the dialectric block to form resonant uh cavities as such and this is one big tune filter block and just popped off a can another can on the main board. There we got some PCB inductors happening around there and another unknown device and under the can next to that which is hooked into this unknown chip down here. just some more passive filtering stuff.

but uh, those two sections were important enough to have cans with inside the main can. go figure. Have a quick look at this uh main keypad had board down here. So what's going on here with this entire Uh block? is that uh what? I Missed at the start was that there is actually a slot in the Uh phone in the bottom of the phone over here and they slid in a full size uh, you know, credit card size um SIM card module into here and then that detection switch is obviously detecting that the Uh SIM card's inserted so the firmware can you know disable the Uh Uh functions for that and the Uh side switch on the side of the thing over here, that slider switch that comes in that.

just uh helps you eject the card back out. um huge chip on board device down here. lots of traces coming out of that sucker. Of course you can barely uh see them in HD there.

but uh, you know that would uh control the that would just be the um LCD uh driver chip onboard LCD driver for the 12 character by two line Matrix LCD Plus, it's probably doing the uh keypad or some keypad stuff at all as well. All the keypad stuff is, uh, just going through the main interface straight over to the processor. I Forgot to mention made in Germany Beauty Hi to all my German viewers and this one here. made in well, the Philippines is the uh uh baseboard down in here for the LCD and the display from a company called 35 Systems wonder if they're still around and I just checked and yes they are 20 years later.

35 Corp uh, they call themselves still do uh. custom display Solutions and uh touch systems go figure. Now we've popped out that board there and there's our rubber membrane keypad. Nothing uh, special there.

except that they did integrate the microphone down in that uh Corner into the M rubber uh membrane. That's rather nice. Uh, get some uh, vibration I ation there. They've got a tiny little uh, Ferite on that just to take the edge off that signal there.

but uh, there you go. Apart from that, we got some um, tactile domes here. On the top side, there's our speaker of course mounted up in the uh top, some regulation uh stuff, probably a speaker amp there and uh, that is pretty much all she wrote and there's our we can probably get a look at the If I get the right angle there. you can see the Uh 12 character uh display on that sucker.

Got to get the right angle though. Yeah, look at that and of course that would be your uh ringer, your buzzer slash ringer. it's you know, had to be I can't remember how loud these uh things were I never owned anyone, but can someone recommend recollect? um if these suckers were allowed ring ring ring ring? What? What mobile phone uh ringtone did they have back in 1994 20 years ago? I Don't know. So there you have it, That's a tear down of the Motorola International 7200 microtac flip phone from 1994.

that is Um 19 almost 20 year old mobile phone technology. Absolutely fascinating. thanks to Uh Thomas uh Salandy for sending that one in. interesting of Technology you know all uh, basic surface mount, but then you get into some real nasty RF uh Voodoo stuff happening in some of these modules.

All of the um, uh, you know, sore filtering or whatever it is, uh going on in there, distributed element, uh, filtering all on the boards. Fantastic. all motor roller Parts which you don't see these days that they come from all over the shops. almost all Motorolla parts.

and there's an AT&T chipset on there I Don't know if AT&T still make chips? We got some other antenna stuff going on there and that is a rather interesting look at an old school mobile phone and this is where it came from, folks. A lot of people take their mobile phone for granted these days. Absolutely. Um, spectacular technology Of course in modern phones, but it's just down to a couple of Uh chipsets.

Now you know you don't Um, a lot of all of this, you know, especially most of the board or half the board or the whole top side of the board. really? um, devoted to all of the RF side of stuff in there. And of course the processing in this, um, you know, just a 68,000 uh variant uh processor in there. you know, not doing a huge uh lot and a basic TW line uh dot matrix character interface display and it said did and said exactly what it was on the box.

It was a mobile phone no more, no less. So just spare thought for the Uh design team at Motorola who came up with this really groundbreaking phone. In terms of the Um, you know, the technology they were able to squeeze into this thing and the for you know, the flip phone form factor. get the power consumption low enough to use a you know, a small nickel metal hydride battery in the thing and you know, Ah, fantastic.

This is where it all came from folks. and uh, if you want to discuss it, and if you have any more info on uh, any of the Uh chips or a schematic or something for this thing, then uh, please jump on over to the Eev blog. Forum I'll try and put some data sheet links in down below and if you like tear down Tuesday Give it a thumbs up. No worries, catch you next time.

but hang on. We got a Bonus We got to tear down this Intell charge XT It's an Intelligent Charger Tada There it is. Woohoo! Look at this old school through hole goodness and we have an old friend look at this. a microchip pick once again.

um, 22nd week 1994. it's a P 16c 57 None of this flash rubbish. Oh fantastic. LM 399 Couple of discreet uh transistors.

looks like we got a couple of Zenas and stuff around there. another LM 39 Um, Lm339 sorry and um, a couple of big ass inductors up there. and that is about all she wrote. but look at that.

a pick handling the intelligent control algorithm. Love it. And that puppy has a massive 2K word uh, program memory once again, onetime programmable um and 72 bytes of ram. One lousy 8bit timer and that's it.

No modern stuff like uarts or Adcs or anything like that. None of those Advanced peripherals you just take for granted these days. Barebones chip would have definitely been hand-coded in assembler. None of this sea rubbish.

And the interesting thing is, you can still buy this thing the exact chip the P 16 C57 at Digi key. They got thousands of them in stock. Like you know, 19 years later. This is what, um, you know is one of the major reasons you choose a manufacturer like Art Microchip Longevity of your parts.

If they had some technical reason, they still wanted to manufacture this. Not a problem, of course, Microchip, don't recommend it for New Designs I'll tell you to use the 16f uh 57 at the very least instead of this uh, onetime programmable one, but you can still buy it. Fantastic. Catch you next time.