Teardowns

Microsoft Kin Two Teardown

Microsoft Kin Two logic board during teardown
The Microsoft Kin Two’s logic board

We partnered with Chipworks to bring you a teardown of the all-new Microsoft Kin Two.

Kin Two’s most notable feature is the Nvidia Tegra processor, which Chipworks found buried beneath a Numonyx package that’s visible on the logic board.

Chipworks confirmed that it was indeed the Nvidia Tegra after a morning of taking x-rays and de-potting chips. Don’t worry kids, no animals were harmed in the process.

Teardown highlights:

  • The Kin Two is 19.05 mm thick. That makes for a bigger bulge in the pants, given that the iPhone and Motorola Droid are 12.3 mm and 13.7 mm thick, respectively. (Enter “Is that a Kin Two, or are you happy to see me?” jokes here.)
  • The Kin Two has two very cool-looking (to a mechanical engineer) springs that keep the phone’s halves either fully-open or fully-closed.
  • For being able to shoot all of 8 megapixels, the camera only eats up about .5 cm^3 of space.
  • Samsung’s moviNAND KLM8G4DEDD package supplies the 8GB of storage space for the Kin. It features a very advanced thirty nanometer architecture, and can transfer data at speeds up to 52 MB/s.
  • The camera is the Sony IMX046. The IMX046 is fabricated using a 90 nm CMOS process. The camera’s resolution is 8.11 effective megapixel (8 active megapixel), 1.4 μm sized pixel, 1/3.2″ optical format. Samsung was the first to use this camera in the M8800.
  • Taking a cue from the iPhone and Zune HD, the Kin Two has an accelerometer. It’s an STMicro 331DL 3 Axis nano MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) device.

Microsoft Kin Two Teardown

You can find more information on the Kin Two on Chipworks’ site.