Infineon’s S-GOLD3 has seemingly been confirmed as the chipset to be used in Apple’s upcoming 3G iPhone, as predicted from examination of the recently released iPhone SDK Beta 3.  According to DigiTimes, Chinese paper Economic Daily News has confirmed that United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) have been selected as the foundry that will produce the chip on Infineon’s behalf.  The chip, PMB8878, will be manufactured on UMC’s 65nm line.

The Infineon S-GOLD3 has prompted fierce discussion about the specifications for the upcoming handset.  While analyst and industry rumors have suggested only minor hardware and software updates for the 3G iPhone, the chipset itself is capable of HSDPA category 8 (7.2 Mbps), camera resolution of up to 5-megapixels, a 2x speed MMC / SD interface, MPEG/H.263 hardware acceleration and video telephony, streaming, recording and playback.  Of course, just because that capacity is there, doesn’t mean Apple will take advantage of it; undoubtedly there would be further issues in battery life which, if Steve Jobs is to be believed, was the original delaying factor for a 3G iPhone.

UMC’s securing of the manufacturing contract is a big success for the company.  The baseband chip in the first-generation iPhone was also an Infineon design, but the foundry partner then was Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).  It’s uncertain whether TSMC bid for the new contract or not.