9 chip stocks riding on Apple Watch
Teardowns of the Apple Watch are revealing which chip companies won Apple’s (AAPL) business for the new smartwatch. ABI Research broke open a sealed S1 processor in the Apple Watch to learn which chip companies supplied components. In a report posted Thursday, ABI said that the S1 chipset included chips from Broadcom (BRCM), NXP Semiconductors (NXPI), SanDisk (SNDK) and STMicroelectronics (STM). The brains of the Apple Watch also included chips from AMS, Dialog Semiconductor, Integrated Device Technology (IDTI), Analog Devices (ADI) and the Elpida unit of Micron Technology (MU). Those chips run the gamut from wireless communications and flash memory to sensors. “A few of (the) key surprises in the design are two touch-controller design wins for ADI and the IDT wireless charging receiver,” ABI said. One loser was InvenSense (INVN), which lost the accelerometer-gyroscope component business to STMicroelectronics, the tech company Chipworks reported in its teardown….