iPhone 5 A6 SoC Teardown: ARM Cores Appear To Be Laid Out By Hand

[wraggster]

Reverse engineering company Chipworks has completed its initial microscopic analysis (http://www.chipworks.com/blog/recentteardowns/2012/09/21/apple-iphone-5-the-a6-application-processor/) of Apple's new A6 SoC (found in the iPhone 5), and there are some rather interesting findings. First, there's a tri-core GPU — and then there's a custom, hand-made dual-core ARM CPU (http://www.extremetech.com/computing/136749-iphone-5-a6-soc-reverse-engineered-reveals-rare-hand-made-custom-cpu-and-a-tri-core-gpu). Hand-made chips are very rare nowadays, with Chipworks reporting that it hasn't seen a non-Intel hand-made chip for 'years.' The advantage of hand-drawn chips is that they can be more efficient and capable of higher clock speeds — but they take a lot longer (and cost a lot more) to design. Perhaps this is finally the answer to what PA Semi's engineers have been doing at Apple since the company was acquired back in 2008..."Pretty picture (http://www.chipworks.com/blog/recentteardowns/files/2012/09/APL0598_APL0-589B01_127521_.jpg) of the chip after using an Ion Beam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_beam#Ion_beam_etching_or_sputtering) to remove the casing. The question I have is how it's less expensive (in the long run) to lay a chip out by hand once instead of improving your VLSI layout software forever. NP classification notwithstanding.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/09/25/225227/iphone-5-a6-soc-teardown-arm-cores-appear-to-be-laid-out-by-hand