EEVblog #370 - Kindle Paperwhite Teardown Review

hi its product Tyrion time again and we've got another Kindle you know I love the Kindle you know I've torn down a few of them previously and reviewed them well we've got the new Kindle paperwhite aha so it's got the new LED backlight on the thing so you can read it at night terrific not too many changes from the regular from the previous Kindle Touch really apart from the paperwhite display it they call it which has the LED backlight on it should be interesting let's tear this sucker down see what's inside let's go now it's for taking this thing apart it does appear to be somewhat different to previous generation Kindles in that the back here you'll notice has no split along the edge so the back case looks like it does not lift off anymore it that's totally changed because if we look at the the Kindle Touch you can see that the back panel there can easily lift off and of course the first generation Kindle I've done a teardown you just go around the edge and you can lift off the back panel like that but this new one is the new paperwhite is significantly different so it looks like we're going to have to lift off this front bezel because your edge is actually on the front and what that means if you're not really careful with your spudger going around the outside you're going to be left with some pretty horrible marks around the edge and yet no doubt I'll probably goof it up and leave a few marks on it but let's give it a go okay I'll use my plastic spudger this time instead of my metal one so let's give it a go let's start over here and see if I can dig into this sucker and get this panel off could be a bit tricky let me try and start this without the camera in the way and see if I can get a foothold in there cameras just a bit awkward being in the way here well my plastic one didn't really cut the mustard there so I've managed to get my metal one under there and it does seem to be have some adhesive on it so kinda have to be pretty careful work our way around this thing and so yeah it's a bit tricky this one that's got little seems to have little dabs of adhesive all the way along it got to be careful not to damage the display in there I guess poking in too far so yeah this could take a bit you should be able to see that adhesive in there it really is a pain in the butt to try and get this thing off I've got another plastic spudger yeah check check that out look at that horrible stuff man ah previous Kindles were much easier to get open than this one this is messy so that top it along there is really troublesome it's really stuck down quite well the sides really just pop straight off and I presume the bottom here is going to be the same pain in the butt as oh no it's not it's not as bad the bottom is not as bad but ah this is just horrid tada we're almost there almost there oh no I let it stick again there it is and we have a date code on the back of the front panel bezel here the 21st of the 9th 2012 that's almost exactly three weeks ago and that includes shipping and everything like that so there you go it's pretty darn recent I'm not sure if that's a manufacture date code for the front panel bezel or whether or not it was manufactured before that and this was the assembly date code or something like that perhaps I'm most likely the manufacturing date code though and it looks like to get access to the rest of it and lift it out we've got a whole bunch of Phillips head screws around here so let's have a crack at those and the whole assembly should just lift out well it's not coming out so I suspect there's a hidden screw up under there a little bastard there's a couple of our clips down the bottom here so obviously this outer housing here actually is that a like a magnesium housing or something I'm not sure but that clips in under those two clips there so clearly it's sort of leave it in down like that and put down and then looks like we got a final screw under there only one way to find out let's get the let's get the knife out have a look tada little mongrel nothing in the back of it no that's it tada we're in and if we have a look at the back of the case here they've spared no expense of course they have the RFID tracking tag which they can use for for production tracking it will have a serial number a unique ID identify built in they can track it during production and stuff like that and all metal threaded inserts in there beautiful good to see they've really spared no expense and here's the passive RFID tag and it's passive because it doesn't have a battery in it it actually gets it generates a voltage from the antenna here and powers the chip inside which then remodulate sit and can send data out I have no idea what the two nine three underscore one is a product code or some type of the device and you can see the tiny chip in there it'll probably have like a little serial number or something embedded in it and that's about it and we have another date code inkjet or something printed on the inside of the case here 24th of the 9th 2012 only like you know less than three weeks ago and the first thing I notice about the PCB is that there's hardly any unshielded circuitry there's a tiny amount up there there's one chip on that flat flex board there by the looks of it a couple of passives or something around here but everything else is under metal shielded cans they're really knocking any issues with a RFI right on the head right there and if we take a look at the battery here it is amazon kindle branded manufactured in japan and it's a model number MC three four five double seven five zero three fourteen twenty milliamp hours are it's a single cell of course five point two five watt hours nominal lithium polymer and of course it looks fairly easy to replace just a couple of screws I'll have some PCB spring terminal contacts under there and it'll just lift off I like it but they really could have gone for a larger battery if they so desired and really kicked the battery life out of the park they could have filled up this entire area with a massive battery huge you would have you know that to at least double the capacity or something like that perhaps but increased cost increased weight it's all the trade off and on the bottom edge of the board you'll notice they've gone to all the trouble to have a little flat flex cable there just to house the out little tactile dome switch for the power switch and then they've gone over to an SMD header over there and well and I have gotten a quite a bit of trouble there it's nicely engineered but maybe expense they didn't need they could have used a right angled tax which perhaps on the board may be embedded into the board if they cut out a little bit of the board or something like that perhaps um load their cost a bit more there but that's well engineered right next to that they've got an unpopulated footprint there I'm not sure what's going on there it's a maybe some sort of soft power latching button chip or some sort of reset chip I don't know but they've decided to leave it off because there's not much in the way of i/o on that thing so really who knows and this rubber thing here believe it or not is the LED there it is it shines out the bottom there and that is sort of clipped onto the underside of the board as well so it sort of slides on over and why they've done that I've got no idea and the little micro USB connector here is a tiny little BGA chip there I can't quite see that I'll have to look under the times ten microscope to get that another little bit of padding here that's uh just I don't know maybe stopping the case or something like that pressing down and a couple tiny little passes and they're right they look like Oh - Oh ones or there abouts ultra tiny and actually this trace here is very curious look at that there's like an AC coupling cap there and that and these look like resistors just a couple of series resistors here I have no idea what that's doing it almost looks like it's a controlled impedance trace that would go to an antenna but that's and there's that little BGA chip IAC 98v one three nine I have no idea what that one is now somewhat curiously on this flat flex cable going over to the PCB we have a Mac chronics MX 25 you four zero three five and that reason I say rather curiously is because that is a four Meg bit serial flash chip what's it actually doing on the flat flex cable there your guess is as good as mine now here is the magic of the paperwhite display it looks like we've got a couple of LEDs along the bottom here which are light into this diffusion film here which then goes over the entire top of the screen and that adds apparently there's a lot of technology that's gone into that into that film into that diffusion type film that makes this thing give complete even light all over the entire screen and the LEDs are ultra low power ultra high efficiency LEDs as well that give the incredibly low power consumption so this thing can get many weeks of battery life with the display backlight I guess well you know still call it a backlight even though it's more like a front light here um display and you can see them lit up here they're they're four LEDs which light up and then give a completely even display I mean look you can't even see any shadowing in there at all maybe slightly on the screen but in real life here with my eyes I can barely see any shadowing on that down that bottom at all and that it looks like um it looks like they might have something LEDs at the top as well but I don't think so I just think that's a light coming out of the diffusion layer and travel traveling all the way through and just popping out the other end there so it looks like it's lit somehow up the top but that's just the light coming all the way through it's really quite neaten these LEDs are actually I'm quite bright here in the lab I'll see if I can capture that on camera and I've completely switched the lights off in the lab here so all I've got is some incidental light coming from through the glass windows at the side of the office plus my exit sign and wow that is really bright I'm not sure what this is set to but jeez this really lights up and of course if you put your hand over that and you don't actually see that because these are incredibly din but if you don't see them that display is just beautiful in the dark I love it so let's go in and find out what level this thing is set to we'll bypass all the Wi-Fi crap and there you go it's set to almost maximum by default out of the box and we can increase that and decrease that right down to that's the absolute lowest so even at the absolute lowest setting there it's still on so there doesn't appear to be actually be an option to turn it off there so I guess they've done the calculations that the current draw from the LEDs right at the absolute minimum is absolutely negligible go figure and the other thing is I can't really see any flicker on there at all as well I can see it certainly stepping through that brightness but on camera shooting this at 25 frames per second there's no PWM flicker on that at all so maybe they're not PWM in that they've actually got an A stable constant current through all those LEDs but I really like that that is neat and it is so even on the display it's absolutely incredible I found something rather curious check this out the Kindle is turned off at the moment but I was just pointing around here and I can make this thing switch on watch this hang on it was there we go look I just switched on the Kindle go figure switch it off there we go it's off and I can maybe yeah if I touch that part of the circuitry which is um part of the LED driver circuitry around there it switches the Kindle on go figure because there's a there's a little four pin device down in there with a cap and there's a little 104 o2 resistor or something like that but yeah look that is just it's all over the place when I get near that with my metallic screwdriver Hey look I wasn't even near it and switched on there's something really weird going on there let me yeah switch this that little tax which is hard to hard to get switch it off again no it's not my fingers not doing anything there but I am able to make the damn thing switch on with my screwdriver if I don't touch it so I'm not impart in any 50 Hertz directly onto a there we go I touch the LED bang straight on weird now these four LEDs here they are actually are mounted on this flat flex this white flat flex our cable over here and if you look on the back here it that's where it are connects to there and you can just pop that off you just lift it off it's just got one of those little board to board interconnect connectors with the flat flex cable there and that plugs in and I can prove that by now switching it on and we're getting no LEDs at all but if we connect it bingo now LEDs are on so clearly this little bit of circuitry down in here is the LED driver probably some sort of art programmable constant current driver and there it is up close there's a little six pin chip there with a cap it looks like a diode there and another cap and a couple of resistors or inductors and a big inductor there and that's about all she wrote for that lead driver and of course the magic with this new display here let me switch it on to easy I can just touch that point down there I love it ah is the evenness of this backlight here but it's not a backlight it's actually a front light it's a nano are imprinted diffusion film that sits on the very top of the device here with the capacitive touch layer underneath that and then the e-ink display under that again with so it's actually reflecting the light downwards so it travels out of the LEDs into the diffusion layer spreads it all out and then points it downwards into the screen and then reflects back out so it's not pointing directly into your eyes so you don't get any fatigue from reading this thing it's absolutely brilliant and Amazon themselves liken it to basically a flattened out fiber-optic cable but that's a pretty crude description of it really there's you know a lot more inter into it than that as far as the dispersion of the light inside right and then directing it downwards very advanced technology I love it and if we try and get a close-up of it in there you can see the layer there edits it seems to be is a bit of giving that so it seems to be some sort of polycarbonate polycarbonate material and but it's not just you know a sheet of clear polycarbonate it's nano imprinted as they say and that is there's some magic happening in there some black magic and that's are causing the light to very quickly once it gets out of this LED if we try to switch it on here can we can we switch it on I was able to switch it on before hang on using the wrong screwdriver let's see it there we go it's on there we go I got it and it very quickly diffuses out I mean it goes in there so you can see it bright hotspot around there but really after that it's a it just you know it completely diffuses and there's no hot spots in the display at all fantastic so my head is off to the design team at Kindle or their subsidiary that designed this my hat's off to them they've done a superb job in getting this our light diffusion technology working and on this part of the board here this looks mysteriously like a micro SD card connector footprint that's designed to poke out the side of the case or maybe not because it's probably not near enough to the side of the case to do that and the footprint actually seems wrong there's eight eight pins there but it just doesn't look right there's only three of them actually wired up let's say if this is yeah if this is pin one here one three five and pin six and pin two there is ground on a standard dark micro SD card I believe the pinyin r6 is normally ground I believes end up on this part of the board here they've gone to all the trouble to route it all around like this and around there and they put this j1 connector there and they haven't populated that at all once again very few signals actually go into the pins of that connector so what that one's doing and a couple of little associated devices that'll slot 23 and other things um I have no idea and there's just more unpopulated footprints here there's another connector here which is going off somewhere doing something and there's another one here go figure now unfortunately all of these metal cans here are soldered down onto the PCB so they would be a real dog to get off and I unfortunately I do want to actually keep this Kindle and use it so sorry folks I'm not going to be taking those cans off to see what process or another stuff is used under there oh I'd like to but you know it's probably not that much different from the original Kindle from the previous site Kindle Touch and that would likely be the freescale AMX 508 same as what's used in the Touch that's an arm cortex a8 processor with a built in ink display driver specifically designed for ink readers like this and we've got a flat flex cable here which you can just lift the lever and pop that out it's got a driver on there it's got a a barcode on the top there so I can to get at that chip number but that just pops off so we'll pop off all these and we'll take this board off I don't expect there to be anything on the bottom I expected to be a single sided load board but we'll take a look anyway it's take the rest of the screws off ah the battery here has an I squared C bus there it is s CL and SD i-- so that's probably got some sort of ID chip in it and it probably may not work without the without if it doesn't detect that that ID is that it may not pair up hmm let's try it alright let's actually measure the standby current draw here with my microcurrent I've got that on micro amp range so millivolts will equal micro amps and let's measure and standby consumption Oh folks something's gone horribly wrong repair needed your Kindle needs repair please contact Kindle customer service wah fail no it's all good there you go it's booting up I replace the battery on the back so clearly um that's what must happen if you try and power this thing from a battery that it doesn't have the the chip on the I squared C bus so there you go can't just power it from any source you would have to revert if you wanted to hack a bigger battery in it you'd have to reverse engineer the I squared C chip in there so I'd love to be able to measure the LED power consumption in various modes and all that sort of stuff but no it's a bit too much trouble I'd really have to hack this thing a fair bit to try and do that but anyway I've taken the mainboard out and not much doing on the back as I said single sided load that lowers their component their manufacturing cost in their manufacturing time as well and you can see all the isolated power planes around there for the various art core voltages and there's various such test points around for the bed of nails test system huh and I was right about this trace here being a controlled impedance trace for the antenna I forgot all about the Wi-Fi functionality of this there's a reason why it's obvious now why they've removed all the copper from the topside there because tada on the bottom side of the board there is your Wi-Fi antenna and they've got to match in one on the other side there as well and if you're curious to see underneath that rubber for the LED to know it's just holding in place a little light pipe there to get the light from the LED which is much further back in there through to evenly lit on the front standard stuff and on the bottom of the microUSB connector there you can see the conductive adhesive shielding braid to help with the EMI and if you check out the bottom of the case here you can actually will the underside of the front of the case anyway you can see the metal shielding braid stuck onto there there's the that's my term might even be a magnesium plastic case on the thing but they've added the extra shielding braid on there which is why they've left exposed or the copper on the bottom of the board here if you're wondering why there's copper as the exposed gold there is because it matches up look that it matches up with that so it effectively forms an RF shielding can for all of the power planes underneath that just like you'd see in a tear down of a spectrum analyzer for example like the RF section section of a spectrum analyzer so they've really they the people who've designed this really know what they're doing and really wanted to absolutely nail any EMI RF interference issues totally on the head for any country in the world any compliance standard they've just absolutely nailed it with this thing I mean you can't do much better than that especially in like a hundred and you know how much you know a hundred and twenty hundred and fifty dollar consumer item you know you can me and they really want to push this board down actually squeeze it down that's why they've got these little metal caps to go over there like that and the screw goes down into the threaded metal insert into the molded housing down there and pushes down the board with that metal cap it's brilliant so everything in here is effectively shielded inside a Faraday cage each separate element of the system design it's got a tone a Faraday shield II can on there the power planes underneath that that connect them all and bind the whole system together sounds like the force um they're effectively art because they're pushed down with these are capped screws here effectively forming one big Faraday cage on the bottom of the board to stop any sideways leakage from the power planes ah beautiful stuff I bet the system designers of this thing when they had to go for their compliance testing they probably didn't even bother with pre compliance testing these winner we're going to balls this one in they probably did and tiny little attention to detail stuff they've probably decided that our look we need a little bit of extra support on the board right down in this bottom corner so they've got the metal threaded insert down in there with this little custom aluminium plate there to sort of hold the edge of the board down I mean that actually might be a kludge afterwards they may have laid out the board and go oh look we need to support it a bit more here but we don't want to reap in the bore and you know probably have to get a compliance tested again or something so maybe they are did a last-minute thing of just so ah that's it we can change it in the housing we'll just add a thing there at a plate and ah Bob's your uncle so that's a little peek inside the new Kindle paperwhite e-book reader I really like it there's some nice technology in there the construction build qualities absolutely awesome sorry I couldn't get into those cans there I don't want to destroy this thing but and there's no thing under the display there perhaps the part number for the manufacturer of the display at best maybe but anyway it's a rather interesting teardown and the construction and system design of this thing is really first-rate they've put a lot of effort not only into the electronic side the RFI shield in the construction the design of this thing and the beautiful new light guide diffusion technology absolutely fantastic my hats off to the design team I really like it so if you want to discuss this jump on over to the eevblog forum and if you liked the video please give it a big thumbs up catch you next time

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 179,775

Rating: 4.8666253 out of 5

Keywords: amazon, kindle, paperwhite, paper white, display, ereader, ebook, reader, amazon kindle, review, teardown, pcb, hack, technology, diffusion, led, battery, life, design, construction

Id: phO4QkHWsVE

Length: 30min 32sec (1832 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 13 2012