[Kindle Fire Teardown (3)] Custom Part Used to Lower Costs

Jan 7, 2012 18:26 Nikkei Electronics Teardown Squad

Continued from [Kindle Fire Teardown (2)] High-density Main Board

"Look! This must be a custom part," an engineer said.

It was a Micro-USB port that was higher than a normal one. We thought this was for making the port as high as the adjacent earphone jack.

If the earphone jack had been directly mounted on the PCB, its height would have been equivalent to that of a normal Micro-USB port.

"I think this method was employed for reducing costs of mounting components," the engineer said.

We removed the rechargeable battery and the main board as well as a large component that stored them from the front half of the case. Then, we found an LCD panel module printed with characters "LG Display."

On one side of the module, an antenna board for wireless LAN was mounted. It was simply attached to the module with a sticker.

When we removed the sticker from the LCD panel module, a flexible printed circuit (FPC) board appeared.

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