Reference no: EM132209795

"The home button journey begins in Hunan Province, China, at a company called Lens technology Ltd. in the city of Changsha, where super-hard transparent artificial sapphire crystal is fashioned into the button cover. This is the path of the button an iPhone user physically touches, made of the same synthetic sapphire used in high-end watches, avionics displays, and missile systems because of its near diamond like hardness, durability, and scratch resistance. The sapphire cover is then bonded to a metal trim ring brought 550 miles from the LY technology factory in Jiangsu province, and then shipped 1000 miles to the Dutch owned NXP semiconductor assembly and testing plant in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. There the sapphire metal ring combo is married to a driver chip imported from a Shanghai factory (another 600 miles) and a touch sensor chip from an NXP silicon-wafer fabrication plant in Europe, which tacks 5000 more miles on to the itinerary. Next, a button switch imported from a Panasonic subsidiary is brought in 1500 miles from Japan, along with the spring-like plastic component called the "stiffener" from a Shanghai factory (another 600+ miles) owned by the American company Molex. These pieces are combined at another Taiwanese manufacturer, Mectek, which adds in its own part, called the flex circuit. Mektek then ships this assembly 1500 miles back to Japan, where a plant run by technology giant Sharp laser welds all the pieces into a sealed and functional touch ID module. The completed assembly ships about 1300 miles to the Foxcon plant in Zhengzhou, China, a virtual high-tech city of 128,439 factory workers that the iPhone's fine assembly takes place. The finished iPhones are shipped by air-freight often through an Alaska hub (on the great arc shortest path from Asia to the US)."'