iPhone 4 Mystery Chip Finally Identified

Shrouded in mystery for almost a full year, a 3mm x 3mm chip inside Apple’s iPhone 4 has been identified as the work of Audience, a provider of noise-cancelation solutions.

Few smartphones out there have two built-in microphones, and Apple’s iPhone 4 is one of them.

When they performed their initial iPhone 4 teardown, the tinkerers at iFixit pretty much covered every chip inside the device, except for a small, 3mm x 3mm chip that was white-labeled, “meaning Apple asked the manufacturer to remove their branding from the package to make it difficult for folks like us to identify.”

“The markings on the chip ’10C0 01S8 0077′ didn’t match any existing part in our database, and we didn’t pursue it further. This part turned up again this February when we got our hands on the Verizon (CDMA) iPhone 4,” they write in a May 17 post.

The repair shop has a relationship with Chipworks, a company that provides reverse engineering and patent infringement analysis to the world's largest semiconductor and microelectronics companies.

“[They] decapped the chip, and guess what they found? That’s right, an Audience low power audio signal processor,” iFixit reveals.

They post an image (left) of the Audience die marking Chipworks found inside the silicon as conclusive evidence of their findings.

According to the tech-savvy bunch at iFixit, “The iPhone’s audio cancellation capabilities are very impressive, outperforming every non-Audience powered cell phone [they]’ve tried.”

They’ve also embedded a test by PocketNow to see (hear) the cancellation in action.

They conclude their analysis by touting Audience as a winner for seeing impressive traction across multiple smartphones, not just Apple’s iPhone.

Provided that Apple decides to one day integrate the technology into the A5 processor powering the iPad 2 and potentially the next-generation iPhone 5, Audience may be on the verge of signing a long-term agreement with Cupertino, the repair experts believe.