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Inside The Apple iPhone 6 Plus: Invensense Makes The Grade

This article is more than 9 years old.

Now that Apple’s latest gadgets have hit the streets, consumers have torn them open to see exactly what’s inside. Companies that are found to be building components for the ever-popular devices get instant bragging rights and often a bump in their stock values.

Analysts have speculated for a while now about whether California-based chip-maker Invensense would snag some business from Apple. Last year, as the company was ramping up production, FORBES spoke with CEO Behrooz Abdi, company insiders and industry watchers to find out if the firm would win a contract. The company kept mum and analysts could only ponder. Well, Invensense finally did it. According to iFixit’s latest teardown of the iPhone 6 Plus, the company provided a 6-axis gyroscope and accelerometer for the phone.

Why have analysts wondered about Invensense finding a place in an Apple device? The company builds microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), sensors with moving parts so small they can be seen only through a microscope. The components tell your smartphone or tablet if it’s being tilted, twisted, shaken, turned left or right and how fast; compass sensors indicate which way is north and help power onboard GPS.

Thanks to the designs of Invensense founder Steve Nasiri – a chip-making genius who launched the company in 2003 on his own dime – the products can be made slightly smaller than competitors’ chips and can be more energy efficient. These are important factors for mobile devices, which always seek to become smaller, sleeker and less demanding of battery life.  Invensense has contracts with Samsung, Motorola, BlackBerry, HTC , Acer , LG and the Nintendo Wii. Its wares sit within most multi-motion-sensor Android phones and even more sensing tablets.

There was speculation that this could be Invensense’s year to strike a deal with Apple. The firm was definitely ready for new business, having upped its production capacity to a billion units earlier this year. Still, in past teardowns sensor chip honors have gone to its chief competitor, the larger French-Italian multinational STMicroelectronics —though there’s talk the California-based firm is eating STM’s market share.

Winning market space in the MEMS world is a big deal, given the proliferation of wearables and mobile devices, which simply must be small and require little energy. Scoring an Apple contract is a boon as the types of sensors that Invensense makes are projected to account for almost half of the $12 billion MEMS chip market by 2017.

Other winning component makers in the latest teardowns of Apple devices include Qualcom – a perennial winner in Apple devices – the Netherlands-based NXP Semiconductor, Avago, RF Micro Devices, Skyworks Solutions, Triquint Semiconductor, SK Hynix, SanDisk, and Austria’s AMS AG.