14 DAY TRIAL // Steve Bitton, a product manager at UBM TechInsights, said he noticed clear evidence of attempts to include a gyroscope in the Apple iPad following a teardown of the device. He reportedly noticed an empty spot on the device’s logic board where the gyro would normally be placed.
“It seemed strange at the time that a product like the iPad would have been designed to not include a gyroscope but an iPhone 4 that was being designed at around the same time would,” said Steve Bitton.
UBM TechInsights is part of United Business Media, the publisher of EE Times (the source of the news).
Bitton had spotted an unpopulated 24-pad spot next to an STMicro STM33DH accelerometer on an iPad’s circuit board, according to report.
He compared it to the circuit board on the iPhone 4, which uses the same accelerometer placed next to it an STMicro L3G4200D gyroscope. The only difference was that the respective chip only required 16 pads, the report says.
"That told us maybe [Apple had] another part in mind,” Bitton said, referring to the original iPad.
So Bitton and his fellow colleagues did some digging around and learned that the only other three-axis digital gyroscope available on the market at the time Apple was testing the iPad was the ITG-3200 from InvenSense, which (not surprisingly) required a 24-pad interface, the EE Times reports.
Moreover, Bitton was able to find similarities to the signal path between the iPad processor and the empty 24-pad space on the iPad board, by tracing the digital output from the gyroscope on the iPhone 4 to its A4 processor.
“In order to perform signal tracing without removing any part from the iPhone, we used slices parallel to the plane of the PCB, and were able to change the Z-axis to step through the metal layers," Bitton said.
"…Apple was possibly testing the idea of a gyroscope within the iPad and had done so using the ITG-3200 by InvenSense as it was the first digital three-axis gyroscope to be released," Bitton added.
"Apple probably chose to wait until the next iteration of the iPad to introduce gyroscope capabilities [and plans] to use [the] ST Micro’s L3G4200D to reduce the amount of [software] development required,” he concluded.
Apple is widely believed to be planning the introduction of new-generation device models this fall, including a camera-enabled iPod touch, a new iPod nano, and a smaller, 7-inch iPad.