Apple tested three-axis gyroscope on the iPad but decided not to include it

Posted August 12th, 2010 at 1:13 pm EST by Steve Mayo

According to Steve Bitton, a product manager at UBM TechInsights that did a teardown of the iPad, Apple tested a gyroscope chip in the iPad but decided not to include it in the first version of the product. In his teardown, Bitton discovered an unpopulated 24-pad spot next to an STMicro STM33DH accelerometer on an iPad circuit board. A circuit board on the iPhone 4 uses the same accelerometer and places next to it an STMicro L3G4200D gyro, but that chip requires just 16 pads. ”It seemed strange at the time that a product like the iPad would have been designed to not include a gyroscope but an iPhone 4 that was being designed at around the same time would,” Bitton said. Bitton subsequently traced the digital output from the gyro on the iPhone 4 to its A4 processor and found similarities to the signal path between the iPad processor and the empty 24-pad space on the iPad board. “Apple was possibly testing the idea of a gyroscope within the iPad and had done so using the ITG-3200 by InvenSense as it was the first digital three-axis gyroscope to be released. Apple probably chose to wait until the next iteration of the iPad to introduce gyroscope capabilities [and plans] to use [the] ST Micro’s L3G4200D to reduce the amount of [software] development required,” Bitton said.

Source: EE Times

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Apple tested three-axis gyroscope on the iPad but decided not to include it

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