Hi Denis, Nikolaus. (I will reply to you both here as for some reason I
didn't get Denis' email through the list.)
On 04/10/16 15:04, H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote:
Hi,
Am 04.10.2016 um 15:43 schrieb Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <gnu...@no-log.org>:
On Tue, 4 Oct 2016 02:19:06 +0100
Josh Branning <lovell.josh...@gmail.com> wrote:
Apple iPhone 7 was released and made use of an iCE5LP4K device. [1]
Are you sure that this FPGA is used for the baseband?
I assumed it was for baseband.
Footnote 35 of the Wikipedia article
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_(FPGA)#iCE40_.2840_nm.29links to
mentioned by Josh is
https://web.archive.org/web/20160916230725/http://www.chipworks.com/about-chipworks/overview/blog/apple-iphone-7-teardown
This says:
The Baseband is a PMB9943 (XMM7360) from Intel.
In the “miscellaneous” section we have;
• Lattice Semiconductor FPGA ICE5LP4K;
So it is probably used for fingerprint sensing or whatever.
You are probably correct.
If so, do we have more information on the design of this baseband:
- What external circuits does it require.
- Is it possible to design a libre baseband based on such FPGAs?
I think it's entirely possible to develop a baseband based on FPGAs. The
company that made the USRP hosts some of it's verilog code on github.
Not sure what the licence is on this though. [1] And you're both
probably aware that that the OsmocomBB project have used the USRP for
various things related to GSM. [2]
Though it'd probably take a lot of work. And need a permit. And may
still be easier just using something like Calypso.
[1] https://github.com/EttusResearch/fpga
[2] http://osmocom.org/projects/baseband/wiki/GSMTAP
As for the iPhone 7, I fear that it won't be realistic to expect it to
be ported to Replicant.
The iDroid project ported some Apple smartphones under Android. The
iPhone 3g was, in iDroid, the device with the best support.
The amount of work required to make such devices usable seemed to be
huge.
Despite that, the people involved in the port succeeded to make lot of
the peripherals and hardware features work, but not the power
management[1].
As a result that device cannot used as a regular smartphone.
I recall that suspend-to-ram wasn't even working, so it was probably
lasting very few hours, I'd blindly guess it was something like 3/4/5 hours.
Also I fear that the ability to run your own bootloader and so on would
be severely restricted. That would probably require the bootrom to have
some bug[2].
[1]shttps://web.archive.org/web/20141024013316/http://www.idroidproject.org/wiki/Status
[2]https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Bootrom#Bootrom_Exploits
Denis.
Ok thanks for letting me know.
BR,
Nikolaus
Josh
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