Teardown lets us peek inside the Samsung Galaxy S5

If, like me, you love to see what makes things tick, then there’s nothing like a good teardown to peel back the mask from the latest and greatest pieces of technology. The folks over at Chipworks have taken apart the new Samsung Galaxy S5, and have compiled a list of virtually everything inside Samsung’s latest flagship handset.

The smartphone was originally sourced from South Korea, the only region where the handset is available right now, so the teardown applies to the SM-G900S model. That’s the most common model, the with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor.

Speaking of which, Qualcomm chips make up a good partition of the handset’s hardware, including the MSM8974AC (Snapdragon 801) SoC and their own WCD9320 audio chip. The image below contains the locations and labels of each chip in the smartphone’s main board.

Turning to some of the Galaxy S5’s more unique features, you can even see the little chips required for the fingerprint scanner and heart rate monitor sensors too. In the images below you can see that the fingerprint scanner is connected to the touchscreen as well as the home button, but a further teardown of the display would be needed to determine exactly how this all works.

One of the Galaxy S5’s big new features is the 16 MP, 1/2.6” optical format camera module and Chipworks has also managed to take a closer look at Samsung’s new Isocell camera sensor as well.  One of the images below shows a cross-section of an 8 MP version of Samsung’s Isocell technology. Note the separation between each of the photodiode regions, which is what helps to reduce crosstalk within the sensor.

There is clearly a lot of technology packed into Samsung’s latest smartphone. If you’d like a closer look at some of the parts, here’s a link to the full teardown.