As drooling (and criticisms) over the iPhone continues apace in the US, here’s something you probably won’t know unless you disassemble your $600 gadget – the iPhone is stuffed full of European intellectual property, according to the Daily Telegraph:

• Wolfson Microelectronics, a spin-out from Edinburgh University which already supplies the iPod, looks to be providing the iPhone audio chip.
• Cambridge-based Bluetooth specialist CSR appears to be the brains behind one of the key components. It has for some time supplied Apple laptops.
• German firm Bald [sic: actual company name is Balda] supplies the most expensive component, the touch screen. (BusinessWeek had this story back in April.)

The paper says confidentiality agreements with Apple prevent any of these firms commenting.

In looking around for other info about the iPhone when writing this post, I came across an interesting press release from iSuppli Corporation released a few days ago which adds Infineon of Germany to the European component supplier list, plus National Semiconductor of the US, and Samsung of South Korea.

It’s nice to see so much European technology at the heart of an American iconic brand and product.

The iSuppli press release also mentions who it thinks supplies components for the LCD display: Epson Imaging Devices Corp., Sharp Corp. and Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology Co. Ltd., all from Japan.

Finally, iSuppli makes a bullish forecast for sales growth of the iPhone:

[…] Sales of the iPhone have kicked off with a bang, and iSuppli believes that this strong performance will continue. Shipments of iPhones are expected to amount to 4.5 million units this year, and will expand by a factor of nearly seven to reach more than 30 million by 2011.

A clever guy, that Steve Jobs.