Samsung officially released its latest Galaxy Note9 on August 9th. Our procurement team did an amazing job in getting the phone into our labs the very next day! The model of our Note9 is AT&T SM-N960U, 128GB.

Many thanks to our lab col-sm-12 col-lgleagues’ quick teardown which allows us an early look at what’s inside the new Note9.

Key Silicon Contents

Our AT&T Note9 model has the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 Application Processor, along with the Samsung K3UH6H60AM-AGCJ 6GB LPDDR4X SDRAM, in a Package-on-Package (PoP). At present, the Snapdragon 845 is Qualcomm’s most advanced - and popular - Application Processor, and we have noted its design-wins in Samsung Galaxy S9/S9+ and many other flagship smartphones. We were hoping to find Samsung’s second generation 10 nm-class (1y nm) LPDDR4X mobile DRAM, but we will have to continue our search.

Since the Application Processor is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 chipset solution, the RF Transceiver, PMIC and other components are also all from Qualcomm: RF Transceiver SDR845, PMIC PM845, and Envelope Tracking QET4100. Qualcomm also supplies the phone’s Display PMIC PM8005 and Audio Codec WCD9341.

In our 128GB phone, we found the NAND Flash is supplied by Samsung itself - KLUDG4U1EA-B0C1 - a 128GB UFS 2.1 flash memory.

Maxim wins the sockets for the PMIC MAX77705 and Audio Amplifier MAX98512. The Power Amplifier and Front-Ends are supplied by Avago (Broadcom) AFEM-9096 FEM, Skyworks SKY78160-51 FEM, and Skyworks SKY77365-11 PAM.

The NFC Controller 80T17 is from NXP and the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module KM8509176 is from Murata.