Apple's recently announced third-generation iPad, which the company failed to give a proper name last Wednesday, has been purportedly identified to be using Qualcomm's MDM9600 baseband for its 4G LTE signal processing chip. Contrary to popular analyst speculation, however, the baseband in question is still based on the 45nm process node and measures 13 x 13mm. Many had suggested that Apple would adopt Qualcomm's 28nm MDM9615 basband for future iOS-based devices, including the third-gen iPad and upcoming fifth-generation iPhone.

Information uncovered by AnandTech shows that there are numerous MDM9x00 references in iOS 5.1 firmware's build path after extracting all the relevant .mbn files from the package. It appears that Apple is using two versions of MDM9x00 to be exact - MDM9200 and MDM9600. The basebands only differ by one having CDMA2000 1x/EVDO enabled, whereas the other does not.



In particular, Qualcomm's 45nm MDM9x00 baseband includes support for UE Category 3 LTE, CDMA2000 1x/EVDO Rev.A (and B), GSM/EDGE, WCDMA/HSPA+ and DC-HSPA+ 42 Mbps.

More images can be found here.