In the wake of my previous teardowns of the iPhone 4 and 4S batteries, I went onto eBay and Amazon (realizing that they finally have Amazon Prime student rates up in Canada) and bought a few iPhone 5 and 5S batteries. Although I was primarily interested in trying to get the gas gauge information out of the batteries, I had a secondary reason. The Nexxtech Slim Power Bank (a subject of a separate blog post) uses a pair of 3.8-volt Li-ion polymer batteries, and they seemed to be be suspiciously similar in size to what is used in the iPhone 5. But enough of that, we’re here for the iPhone 5 battery in particular!
Battery Casing
The iPhone 5 battery measures 3.7 mm in thickness, 3.2 cm in width and 9.1 cm in length. This particular model, made by Sony, has a model ID of US373291H, with the six digits corresponding to the cell’s dimensions. This cell has a labeled capacity of 1440 mAh at a nominal 3.8 volts, with a maximum charge voltage of 4.3 volts. I tried to read the data matrix barcode on the cell but my barcode scanning app on my phone refused to recognize it. I might try to scan and sharpen the barcode later but it’s not something that’s of a high priority to me.
Battery Teardown and Pinout
The board itself is rather interesting. The protection MOSFETs used to switch the battery’s power are chip-scale packages and are glued down with epoxy, same with the gas gauge itself. This means that I can’t easily replace it with a rework station if the need arises. The board includes the gas gauge, thermistors, protection circuitry and still has room for a polyfuse for extra over-current protection.
iPhone 5 battery PCB layout
The pinout of the iPhone 5 battery is pretty much the same as of the iPhone 4 and 4S. You have Pack-, NTC Thermistor, HDQ and Pack+. In this particular model of battery, the gas gauge is a bq27545 (labeled SN27545), but has basically the same feature set as the iPhone 4/4S’ bq27541. With this information, I soldered to the small terminals on the connector (the actual connectors for this battery haven’t arrived yet since it takes so long to receive items from China on eBay), and hooked it up to my trusty Texas Instruments EV2400 box.
iPhone 5 battery pinout
Battery Data
And once again, we’re presented with an obscure firmware revision. The latest bq27545-G1 firmware is only version 2.24, but this chip has version 3.10. After forcing GaugeStudio to accept this gauge as a -G1 version, we’re once again presented with a sealed chip. Let’s try to unseal it with the default key…
Nope. No dice with 0x36720414, unlike last time.
… and I get the dreaded “Unseal Key” prompt. Cue the dramatic Darth Vader “NOOOOO” here. Maybe Apple read my previous post and decided to change the default keys this time (Hey Apple, if you read this, make the iPhone 6’s gas gauge have the default keys again)! This means that not only can I not access any of the juicy details of this battery, but I cannot update its firmware to a more… conventional version either. I could try brute-forcing it, but trying to hack a key with a 32-bit address space over a 7 kbps bus… uh, no. That’s not going to happen. I’d probably have better luck reverse-engineering Apple’s battery code but I doubt they have any facility to do in-system firmware updates for the gas gauge.
Data captured from GaugeStudio
Now for some rather… interesting details of what we can access. The design capacity of this battery, according to the gas gauge, is 1430 mAh, same as the iPhone 4S and also 100 mAh less than what’s written on the label. That, and the full charge capacity of this battery is 1397 mAh out of the gate. The gauge seems to be an insomniac (it won’t enter Sleep mode even when the battery is not hooked up to any load), and it seems to have less features despite having a higher firmware version (I’m sure the internal temperature isn’t 131 degrees C…), and the Pack Configuration register doesn’t bring up any sensible data.
Battery… conspiracy?
One thing that I haven’t confirmed is whether or not this battery had been tampered with before I received it. I bought this particular battery from eBay and it was listed as new. It had some adhesive residue but no obvious sign of being peeled off from another iPhone. The cycle count is set to 1, and because the gas gauge is sealed, I can’t read any other data like the lifetime data logs. There is a chance that this battery isn’t new and that the seller had somehow changed the data memory and sealed the chip with a non-default key, but I need to wait until some other batteries arrive in the mail and perhaps try reading out batteries taken out directly from some iPhone 5s. Until then, it’s only speculation as to why this chip is sealed with a different key.
The next victims specimens: an iPhone 5S battery, a “new” iPhone 4 battery, and an Amazon Kindle battery.
Rip It Apart - Jason's electronics blog-thingy 