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TI owns inside of Amazon Kindle Fire

Texas Instruments dominates the silicon inside the Internet retailer's tablet. It probably wouldn't be an overstatement to say that Amazon has simply dropped in a TI engine to power the tablet.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers

Aside from a couple hulking memory chips, Texas Instruments owns the interiors of Amazon's Kindle Fire.

iFixit's teardown shows an abundance of TI silicon, with flash memory storage and system memory from Samsung and Hynix, respectively.

Keep in mind that a system-on-a-chip (SoC) like TI's OMAP 4430 already packs many of the core device features onto one piece of silicon. But the Kindle Fire also attaches a number of less glamorous TI chips to the SoC for things like power management and audio.

Lifting off the RAM chip reveals the TI dual-core OMAP 4430 chip.
Lifting off the RAM chip reveals the TI dual-core OMAP 4430 chip. iFixit

Under the hood of the Amazon Kindle Fire:

  • Texas Instruments dual-core OMAP 4430 system-on-a-chip (SoC).
  • Texas Instruments 603B107 power management chip
  • Texas Instruments AIC3110 Audio Codec
  • Samsung KLM8G2FEJA 8 GB Flash Memory
  • Hynix H9TKNNN4K 512 MB of Mobile DDR2 RAM
  • Jorjin WG7310 WLAN/BT/FM Combo Module


Kindle Fire's headphone jack, Micro-USB port, and power button.
Kindle Fire's headphone jack, Micro-USB port, and power button. iFixit

The TI OMAP 4430 system-on-a-chip.
The TI OMAP 4430 system-on-a-chip. Texas Instruments

And about that disproportionately large battery. Here's what iFixit says: "Only one connector and some glue keep this monstrous battery in its place...the Fire's 4.6" tall x 4.3" wide Li-Ion battery. This battery sure puts out... 16.28 Watt-hours, to be exact. However, due to the size of the Fire, its battery's 3.7 V potential and 4400 mAh capacity don't quite stack up to the specs of the iPad 2 Wi-Fi's battery."