Industry Expert Blogs

If you have bought a Samsung Gear S2 smartwatch for Christmas, you certainly didn’t open it to do a teardown. Chipworks did it and have shared the results: Qualcomm is the big winner here with five different chips: Snapdragon 400 as the main CPU of the system, the RF transceiver, the audio codec, the power and the baseband processor (MSM8226). Not really a surprise as the Qualcomm wireless port-folio is certainly the strongest in the industry.

Samsung has integrated three of its own chips, DRAM memory, NFC controller and Wi-Fi module, a DC-DC converter for AMOLED, accelerometer and gyroscope and barometer from STMicroelectronics and another DC-DC converter from TI. In fact, the real surprise comes from a chip from DSP Group HDClear family, especially dedicated to manage the audio command capabilities of Samsung Gear S2. At the heart of the DSPG HDClear is CEVA-TeakLite-III DSP core that DSPG has licensed a few years ago.

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