Kindle Fire Teardown Report Suggests Business to TI's Taiwanese Partners

Taipei, Dec. 15, 2011 (CENS)--Texas Instruments' (TI's) Taiwanese partners, including foundries Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC), are expected to benefit from TI's inclusion in the suppliers contracted by Amazon.com Inc. to supply chips for its Kindle Fire tablets.

According to Kindle Fire's teardown report recently released by iFixit, TI is a supplier of analog chips for the Amazon.com's tablet PC. The upcoming Kindle Fire is touted to rival Apple iPads, making it another potential hot seller in tablet PC sector which will benefit TI and its Taiwanese partners.

The partners include Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc. (ASE), Ardentec Corp. and Lingsen Precision Industries Ltd., in addition to TSMC and UMC.

Other device suppliers of the Amazon.com tablet include Samsung Electronics and Hynix Semiconductor Inc. Samsung is the supplier of 8G NAND Flash memory chips while Hynix supplies DDR2 RAM. TI supplies power management chips, 1GHz OMAP 4430 processor, and 802.11 b/g/n WiFi solution in the deal.

The teardown report shows that the tablet is equipped with Jorjin Technologies of Taiwan's WG7310 and WLAN/BT/FM radio modules.

Amazon.com projects its tablet PC shipments at fiver million systems throughout the fourth quarter of 2011 and estimates it to deliver more of the PCs in 2012 than 2011.