A month back, I tore down Walmart’s onn. 4K Streaming Box, the Google TV-based successor to the company’s initial Android TV-based UHD Streaming Device that I’d dissected mid-last year. And as promised in last month’s coverage, this time I’ll be taking a look at the guts of its “stick” form factor sibling, the Google TV-based Full HD Streaming Device, the successor to the Android TV-based FHD streaming stick predecessor that went “under the knife” last December.
Read through those previous two sentences again and you might catch the meaning behind the “just don’t call it a stick” bit in this writeup’s title; similarly, you might get why last month I wrote:
Also, it’s now called a “box”, versus a “device”. Hold that latter thought until next month…
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The word “device” seems to have inconsistent form factor association within Walmart. In the first-generation onn. product line, it referred to the “box”, with the rectangular form factor explicitly called a “stick”. This time around, the “stick” is the “device”, with the square form factor referred to as a “box” instead. Then again, as I mentioned last month, the first generation “box’s” UHD maximum output resolution is now instead referred to as “4K”, and similarly, the “stick” form factor has transitioned from “2K FHD” to “Full HD” in the product name, so…🤷♂️
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Anyway…in last month’s piece, I pointed out the surprising-to-me commonality between the hardware in the two “box” generations’ designs. Will the same be the case with the two generations of “stick” devices? And as with Walmart’s “box” devices in comparison to the TiVo RA2400 Stream 4K, will I also encounter commonality between Walmart’s “sticks” and other manufacturers’ devices? There’s only one way to find out…let’s begin with a “stock” shot:
Now for the actual packaging of today’s patient, which set me back $14.88 in November 2023.
The joke never seems to get old, at least for me…you might disagree…
It’s a box-within-a-box!
Flip open the top flap, and we get our first glimpse of the still-protected-by-plastic device inside, along with a sliver of literature (PDF here).
Here they are now freed from their cardboard captivity, as usual accompanied by a 0.75″ (19.1 mm) diameter U.S. penny for size comparison purposes:
Underneath are the AC power adapter, an HDMI extension cable, the remote control and a set of batteries for the latter:
Here’s a close-up of the AC power adapter’s micro-USB connector:
and its markings; interestingly, the max input current is higher than that for last month’s “box” PSU (0.25 A vs 0.2 A), although the output current specs are the same (1 A). I suspect that the input current variance is just efficiency-reflective of the sourcing deviation between the two PSUs, not of the respective systems’ actual power requirements. In fact, I’m expecting a lower-power-consumption SoC inside this time, along with decreased memory and the like.
Here are the “male” and “female” ends of the HDMI extension cable:
And here’s the battery compartment-exposed backside of the remote control, which appears to be identical to last month’s “box” remote:
Now for our patient, with dimensions of 3.54 x 1.18 x 0.51 inches (90.5 x 30 x 13 mm), quite close to those of its Android TV-based precursor (3.81 x 1.39 x 0.61 inches). That said, there are some physical design variations between them:
- No passive airflow vents either top or bottom this time, and
- Last time there was no status LED included in the design, and the recessed reset switch and micro-USB power input were on opposite sides of the device. This time, the micro-USB power input is on one end (with the HDMI connector again on the other), and a status LED has been added, next to the reset switch.
A closeup of that last shot reveals, among other things, the FCC ID (2AYYS-8822K2VTG, and no, reminiscent of what I also said last month, I don’t know why there are 21 different FCC documents posted for this ID, either!).
Applying a spudger to the gap between the two case halves get them apart with damage to only one of the plastic tabs.
For orientation purposes, we’re looking at the inside of the top half of the device case, along with the top of the PCB (“top” and “bottom” being somewhat meaningless with a “stick” form factor, as I’ve noted before, but I’m going by where the brand logo is stamped on the case):
The PCB then lifts easily out of the remaining bottom case half.
Here’s the inside of the bottom half of the case, once again accompanied by the top of the PCB:
and now with the PCB flipped over to reveal its bottom side. Note, for example, the light guide (aka, light pipe, light tube) that, as with the one we saw last month, routes the output of the LED on the PCB (at bottom, to the right of the Faraday cage) to the outside world.
Speaking of Faraday cages, let’s flip back to the PCB topside and begin our disassembly. En route to that destination, here are snapshots of both sides:
The heat sink on top clung to the Faraday cage below it stubbornly finally relented in the face of my intense spudger attention.
The Faraday Cage itself was much less removal-resistant:
Focusing in proved to be…interesting, among other things (including initially frustrating).
The IC on the left was easy to ID, although the marking was faint (stay tuned for another photo where it’s clearer, courtesy of augmented lighting). It’s Amlogic’s S805X2, another in a long line of examples of onn. devices based on application processors from this supplier. The S805X2 was introduced in Q2 2020, and Wikipedia lumps it into the company’s fourth-generation product line in seeming contrast to the “2” end character in its product line. The “X”, as I explained last month and versus the “Y” version seen in that teardown, refers to its integration of wired Ethernet support, which is a bit curious, particularly for a “stick” form factor device, albeit not unique (note, for example, Ethernet over micro-USB on the Chromecast Ultra).
Versus the Amlogic S805Y-B seen in the Android TV-based “stick” predecessor, the S805X2 bumps up the quad-core Arm Cortex-A35 processor cluster’s clock speed from 1.5 GHz to 1.8 GHz (vs 2 GHz in the Amlogic S905Y4 seen last month, however), upgrades the GPU from the Mali-450MP to the Mali-G31 MP2, and (like last month’s S905Y4) adds decoding support for the AV1 video codec. And speaking of Chromecasts, I need to give credit where it’s due (the Reddit crowd) on this one; it’s essentially-to-exactly the same SoC found in the “HD” variant of Google’s Chromecast with Google TV. The only variance, for which I can’t find clarifying documentation, is that in this case it’s marked “S805X2-B” whereas the one in Google’s design is the “S805X2G”.
Move to the right and you’ll encounter another example of Chromecast with Google TV commonality…sort of. And this one caused me no shortage of teeth-gnashing until I eventually figured it out. Revisiting my last-December teardown of this device’s Android TV-based predecessor, you’ll find that it contains 1 GByte of system DRAM, comprised of two 4 Gbit memory devices. Last month’s “box” sibling, conversely, touts 2 GBytes of system DRAM, assembled from two 8 Gbit memories. I already knew from the product specs on Walmart’s website that this device embeds 1.5 GBytes of DRAM. And so, since I’d thought memory pretty much always is sold in binary-increment capacities (1, 2, 4, 8, 16…), I figured that as with the similarly 1.5 GByte-equipped Chromecast with Google TV HD Edition, I’d find the two-device combo of 8 Gbit and 4 Gbit memories inside.
Problem is, though, that after identifying the other two notable ICs in this design, which you’ll see next, I could only find one other chip: this one. And it’s marking were unlike any I’d ever seen before. Again, they’re quite faint under ambient light; I tried both a loupe and supplemental lighting to make at least the company logo clearer for both me and thee:
Here’s the four-line mark:
[COMPANY LOGO] ARTMEM
ATL4X12324
M102
325M10
Doing web searches for “ARTMEM”, “ATL4X12324” and the combination of the two got me…basically nothing. Eventually, however, I stumbled across an obscure page on MIT’s website that clued me in to the likely full company name, Artmem Technology. That website is totally in Chinese, however, which didn’t help me at all. But after searching again on the full “Artmem Technology” phrase, I came across the website of another China-based semiconductor supplier, Rayson HI-Tech, which offers an English-language option and identifies Artmem as its subsidiary.
Progress! Diving further into Rayson’s website, specifically to the “Industrial/Automotive LPDDR4/4X” product page, I indeed found a 1.5 GByte product variant (along with other non-binary increment options…3 GBytes and 6 GBytes, specifically) with the following parameters:
- Product model: RS384M32LX4D2BNR-53BT
- Bit width: x32
- Speed (presumably max, and operating voltage-dependent): 3733 Mbps
- Encapsulation mode: FBGA 200-ball
- (Operating) voltage: 1.8/1.1/0.6V
- (Operating) temperature: 25-85°C)
I’m guessing this is our chip, with alternate (subsidiary) supplier branding. Is there an atypical 12 Gbit monolithic memory die inside that package? Or did the company combine more common 8 Gbit and 4 Gbit die side-by-side under a single package “lid”? Or was it a three-die 4 Gbit “stack”? Or did the supplier just “down-bin” a 16 Gbit die to come up with the 12 Gbit guaranteed capacity? I ran this mystery by my long-time colleague Jim Handy, semiconductor memory expert at market analyst firm Objective Analysis, and he had several insights:
- Non-binary packaged unit capacities are more common than I’d realized, especially for LPDDR DRAM variants (which are also commonly spec’d in GByte vs Gbit densities)
- His guess is that there’s a three-die “sandwich” inside, with each die 4 Gbit in capacity, likely sourced from CXMT and/or JHICC, the two major DRAM makers in China, and
- The built-in translation support offered by Google’s Chrome browser works pretty well, judging from the screenshots of Artmem Technology’s English language auto-converted website that he sent me (I’m normally a Mozilla Firefox guy).
Please respond in the comments, readers, if you have additional informed insights on this!
The other notable IC—wireless module, to be precise, as you’ve probably already guessed from its antennas’ proximity—on this side of the PCB and to the right of the mystery DRAM, is much easier to ID. Like its predecessor in last December’s teardown, and unlike its sibling in last month’s teardown, it’s clearly marked on top. This is the 6222B-SRC from Fn-Link, containing a Realtek RTL8822CS Bluetooth-plus-Wi-Fi transceiver (which you can see in the internal photos on the FCC website). There was no separate (PCB-embedded or otherwise) Bluetooth antenna that I could see in this particular design, and Fn-Link’s documentation subsequently confirmed my suspicion that the module optionally supports multiplexing the 2.4-GHz Bluetooth and Wi-Fi functions on the same antenna:
Speaking of which, here are some closeups of those antennas:
Last, but not least, let’s flip the PCB back over again and see what’s underneath that bottom-side Faraday cage we earlier glimpsed:
It’s the nonvolatile memory counterpart to the earlier volatile DRAM; a FORESEE FEMDNN008G-08A39 8 GByte eMMC NAND flash memory module. FORESEE is one of the brand names of a Chinese company called Longsys, who had also acquired the Lexar brand from Micron Technology back in 2017. And speaking of “see”, I think that’s all to see today, at least from me. Let me know what I might have overlooked in the comments!
As soon as I saw that Aalyia had published this teardown, I tackled reassembly of the device in the hopes of subsequently donating it for ongoing use by someone else. I’m happy to report that,as was the case with its “box” sibllng last month, I was successful!
—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the company’s online newsletter.
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