Hacker News Reader

> Wait, they needed testing late last year to figure out the chip was physically too big to be used in an iPhone?

The area that a chip takes up is the physical size of the part, any passives it needs, and the space to route the traces to connect them all and meet noise/emf specs.

It can take a very long time to figure out if a part is "too big" because it requires iterative design/redesign time by engineers, and it's not knowable before they begin working with the part.

More likely that they wanted to get it working first, within power budget second, and shrinking the board to the needed physical sizes third, but they didn't get to second base.

The chip might be small. The required board to use it can be big due to placements constraints, required extra components to make it work, space required for routing antenna traces, heat dissipation, etc.

While at those engineering levels you can emulate and foresee all that, sometimes shit simply happens.