Samsung scores again

Perhaps, the biggest winner among the component suppliers for the iPhone was Samsung. Samsung supplies the iPhone applications processor, which includes an ARM RISC core. The processor costs $14.25 in both versions of the iPhone. It also contributed the NAND flash memory and DRAM for the iPhone. In the 4Gbyte version, Samsung has $24 worth of NAND flash, and $48 in the 8GByte version. For both versions, Samsung supplies 1Gbit of Double Data Rate SDRAM worth $14.00.

Samsung has $76.25 worth of semiconductor content in the 8Gbyte version of the iPhone, giving the company a 30.5 percent share of the product's hardware cost—the largest total of any single supplier.

Other winners

Other companies scoring design wins in the iPhone include:

* Wolfson, which continues to maintain its design win for the audio codec a notable achievement given the obvious challenge to maintain design wins from generation to generation in the iPod family.

* CSR plc, which supplies the iPhone Bluetooth silicon costing $1.90.

* Marvell, which is contributing a Wi-Fi baseband chip costing $6.00.

iPhone outlook

Sales of the iPhone have kicked off with a bang, and iSuppli believes that this strong performance will continue. Shipments of iPhones are likely to amount to 4.5 million units this year, and will expand by a factor of nearly seven to reach more than 30 million by 2011, according to Tina Teng, analyst, wireless communications, for iSuppli. The figure below presents the iSuppli forecast of annual iPhone unit shipments.