Inside your smartphone: the German parts nobody sees
No phone sold today carries a German brand of note, yet German sensors, liquid crystals, glass and silicon sit inside a great many of them. A walk up the supply chain, from Reutlingen to Burghausen.
Germany does not make smartphones. There is no German handset brand of global consequence, and the final assembly of almost every phone on the market happens in Asia. Yet open one up and follow its parts back to the factories that made them, and Germany turns up again and again. It is rarely on the logo. It is in the sensor that knows which way the phone is tilted, in the moving membrane of the microphone, in the chemistry of the screen, in the glass of a folding display and, further upstream, in the silicon from which the chips are cut.
This is a story about invisibility. The German firms in a smartphone sell to other manufacturers, who sell to the brands, who rarely name their suppliers. Apple and Samsung do not publish bills of materials. What we know comes from company statements, from teardown specialists and from the trade press. Where a link rests only on a report, we say so.
The sensors that know which way is up
Rotate your phone and the screen turns with it. Count your steps, and a tiny accelerometer is doing the counting. Climb a flight of stairs, and a barometric pressure sensor may register the change in altitude. These are MEMS devices, micro-electro-mechanical systems: structures of silicon so small that a working mechanical sensor fits in a package a few millimetres across.
Bosch has been making MEMS sensors in volume since 1995, first for cars. In 2005 it set up Bosch Sensortec to sell them into consumer electronics. The scale that followed is remarkable. In 2015 Bosch said that three out of four smartphones worldwide used Bosch Sensortec sensors. In December 2018 it said that more than half of the world's smartphones contained at least one Bosch MEMS sensor, and that it had made more than ten billion such sensors since 1995. In 2024 alone, Bosch Sensortec says, it shipped more than one billion of them. Bosch cites the analyst firm Yole Group as ranking it the global market leader in MEMS sensors.
Teardowns confirm specific design wins. When Chipworks opened the iPhone 6 in 2014, it found a three-axis Bosch BMA280 accelerometer working alongside a second motion sensor from another supplier. When iFixit took apart the Apple Watch Series 2 in 2016, it found a Bosch BMP280 barometric sensor on the underside of the main board. Apple did not mention the part in its marketing. Suppliers change from one model to the next, so these findings describe particular devices, not every phone that followed.
What most people do not know: making one of these sensors is slow. Bosch says a production run takes up to 14 weeks and several hundred process steps in its wafer fab at Reutlingen, south of Stuttgart. And the parts have shrunk dramatically: Bosch says its first MEMS accelerometer for consumer devices, about 20 years ago, was 15 times larger in package volume than its current sensors.
We profile the technology in more detail in Bosch Sensortec MEMS sensors.
The microphone's moving part
A smartphone carries several microphones, for calls, video and noise cancellation. The packaged microphone may carry the name of a Chinese or American assembler, but the critical element inside is a MEMS die: a silicon membrane that moves with sound pressure. Here the German name is Infineon.
In 2020 the analyst firm Omdia put Infineon at 43.5 per cent of the world market for MEMS microphone dice by unit sales, almost four percentage points ahead of the second supplier. The teardown firm System Plus Consulting, examining the iPhone 7 microphones in 2016, reported that one of the microphone makers, Goertek, relied on Infineon for die manufacturing, using an Infineon dual-backplate design. In other words, a German chip was inside a microphone sold under a Chinese name, inside a phone designed in California.
Infineon's presence in phones goes beyond audio. In 2012 the company said it was the world's leading supplier of security microcontrollers for NFC, the short-range radio behind contactless payment, with a 51.5 per cent share according to IMS Research, and that its chips were already used in most NFC-enabled smartphones of the time. That figure is now old, and the market has since changed, so it should be read as history rather than a current share.
A screen built on carrot chemistry
Most people know that LCD stands for liquid crystal display. Fewer know that the liquid crystals in a very large share of the world's LCDs come from Darmstadt. Merck KGaA has been in the business for more than a century.
The story begins in 1888, when the Austrian botanist Friedrich Reinitzer, working with substances extracted from carrots, noticed a compound with two melting points. The German physicist Otto Lehmann studied the strange in-between state and called it a liquid crystal. By 1904 Merck was selling liquid crystals for scientific research. For six decades they were a curiosity. Only after George Heilmeier showed a working display in 1968, and after the British chemist George Gray discovered the cyanobiphenyls, did Merck develop stable mixtures fit for mass production.
In 2015 Merck said it produced more than 60 per cent of all liquid crystals sold worldwide. That is the company's own figure, and it is a decade old. Merck's licristal UB-FFS mixtures were adopted particularly in smartphones and tablets, where they help screens stay readable outdoors while saving power. See Merck liquid crystals.
Many phones now use OLED screens instead, which need no liquid crystals at all. Merck followed the shift: it sells OLED materials under the livilux brand and opened an OLED production unit in Darmstadt in 2016, at a cost of more than 30 million euros. Which Merck OLED materials sit in which phone is harder to establish. In 2022 the Korean outlet The Elec reported that Samsung Display was likely to source a green emitter-layer material from Merck. That was a report of a likely change, not a confirmed contract, and we treat it as such.
Glass that folds
Folding phones posed a problem that sounds impossible: a screen cover that bends like plastic but feels like glass. SCHOTT, the Mainz glassmaker owned by the Carl Zeiss Foundation, was one of the answers.
When Samsung launched the Galaxy Z Flip in 2020, SCHOTT confirmed to CNET that it supplied the ultra-thin glass, and Samsung Display said the glass was 30 microns thick, roughly a third of the width of a human hair. According to Display Daily, SCHOTT delivers its Xensation Flex glass to the Korean processor Dowoo Insys, which cuts, edge-finishes, chemically strengthens and laminates it before it reaches the display. SCHOTT's down-draw process makes glass from 1.1 to 30 microns thick, and the company says the flexible version can bend to a radius below 2 millimetres. In 2022 SCHOTT said that the vivo X Fold used three of its glasses: ultra-thin glass on the main folding screen, Xensation Alpha over the outer display and a further SCHOTT glass over the camera optics.
Further upstream: the silicon
Every chip in a phone, from the processor to the memory, begins as extremely pure silicon. Here two Bavarian companies sit near the very start of the chain.
Wacker Chemie makes hyperpure polysilicon in Burghausen and Nünchritz in Germany and in Charleston, Tennessee. In July 2025, opening a new purification line in Burghausen worth more than 300 million euros, Wacker's chief executive said that every second computer chip is made from polysilicon delivered by Wacker. The company says the material is more than 99.9999999999 per cent pure, with critical impurities measured in parts per trillion. Those are company claims, but Wacker has been making semiconductor-grade silicon since 1959 and describes itself as the only European producer. See Wacker hyperpure polysilicon.
That polysilicon is melted and grown into single crystals, then sliced into wafers. Siltronic, which began life in 1968 as a Wacker unit, makes 200 mm and 300 mm wafers in Burghausen, Freiberg, Singapore and Portland, Oregon. It describes itself as the only Western-based wafer manufacturer among the leading group, and in 2022 it was very nearly Taiwanese: a takeover by GlobalWafers collapsed when German regulatory approval did not arrive in time.
The patterns are then printed on those wafers by lithography machines. ASML in the Netherlands is the only maker of EUV scanners, but two of its most critical subsystems are German: the optics from ZEISS and the drive laser from TRUMPF, which Fraunhofer describes as the world's strongest pulsed industrial laser. We have covered both in ZEISS EUV optics and the TRUMPF EUV laser amplifier.
And the signal leaves through German glass
A phone is only as useful as the network behind it, and much of that network runs on optical fibre. Heraeus, the family-owned group from Hanau, says it is the largest manufacturer of synthetic fused silica for telecommunication fibres. The fused silica forms the cladding that makes up most of the glass in a fibre. Heraeus says a single modern preform, the glass cylinder from which fibre is drawn, yields 4,000 kilometres of fibre. About a decade ago its plant in Bitterfeld, opened in 1992, said its material was used in about a quarter of all optical fibre made worldwide. See Heraeus synthetic fused silica.
Why the invisibility matters
The pattern is consistent. Germany is absent where margins depend on brand and scale of assembly, and present where they depend on materials science, clean-room process discipline and decades of accumulated know-how. MEMS fabs, liquid crystal synthesis, ultra-thin glass and semiconductor-grade silicon all have high barriers to entry and long qualification cycles. Once a supplier is designed in, it tends to stay.
That position is not guaranteed. Ownership is shifting: Wacker cut its Siltronic stake from about 31 per cent to about 15 per cent during 2026, and the near-sale of Siltronic to Taiwan showed how quickly a strategic asset can be put in play. Competitors in Asia are investing heavily in every one of these niches. But for now, the honest answer to the question "is there anything German in my phone?" is: almost certainly, and probably more than you think.
Sources
- Bosch (via Cision): Three out of four smartphones use Bosch Sensortec sensors (2015)
- Bosch Media Service: Why mini Bosch components will feature in so many gifts (2018)
- Bosch Sensortec: 20 years of sensing the future
- MacRumors: iPhone 6 and 6 Plus equipped with two accelerometers
- Notebookcheck: iFixit finds undisclosed sensor in Apple Watch
- EE Times Asia: System Plus examines iPhone 7's MEMS mics
- Yole Group: Infineon takes lead in MEMS microphone market
- Infineon: Global market leader in security chips for NFC (2012)
- IndustryWeek: Merck produces 60% of liquid crystals, which owe their existence to carrots
- chemeurope.com: Merck celebrates 125 years of liquid crystals
- 9to5Mac: Samsung gains help for OLED material (citing The Elec)
- GadgetMatch: Samsung Galaxy Z Flip is definitely glass, from Schott
- Display Daily: With ultra-thin glass, Schott leads the way
- Wacker: New production line for semiconductor-grade polysilicon (2025)
- Börsen-Zeitung: Bei Siltronic verschieben sich die Machtverhältnisse (2026)