As usual, the idea behind the teardown is not only to figure out who Nintendo’s component suppliers are and what parts are being used, but to estimate how much all the components cost to help guess how much of a profit margin Nintendo is making on each unit. And it looks like a decent margin. ISuppli says the cost of all the parts in the device itself plus what’s in the box amount to $103.25 for a device that’s selling at retail for $249. The cost works out to an increase of about $25 over the Nintendo DSi, the most recent Nintendo handheld, released in 2009, which cost about $78, when iSuppli tore it apart that year.

While most of the components come from Japan, it’s not entirely clear if the supply of any of the parts used come from areas affected by the earthquake and tsunami, says Andrew Rassweiler, an iSuppli analyst who supervised the teardown. “Many of these component should have a greater risk exposure to supply chain problems, though we don’t know about any specific disruptions at this point,” he said.

The most expensive component, as is often the case with consumer electronics, is the displays. The 3DS uses two Sharp displays that cost a combined $33.80. The headliner is the top screen 3D. It’s a 3.5-inch 800-by-240 pixel display that uses an LCD-based parallax barrier panel sandwiched to the back of the color LCD which alternates between the left and right images at a high rate of speed to produce the 3D effect. “It looks like a conventional LCD from the outside, but when you open the display you see that on one side of the glass is essentially the conventional color element, and on the other side of the glass is a monochrome element,” Rassweiler told me. “It’s a clever bit of display engineering.”

The handheld’s main chip is an applications processor. It’s a custom ARM-based chip manufactured by Sharp, that at a cost of $10.02 is only slightly more expensive than the chip in the previous Nintendo DSi. However, Nintendo has quadrupled the amount of flash memory in the 3DS versus the DSi to 16 gigabytes, and Samsung, the world’s largest manufacturer of flash, supplied it. Fujitsu supplied another type of memory known as fast-cycle RAM. Rassweiler says for this particular type of memory, Nintendo has used a type of chip that’s only made by Fujitsu, which is odd because FCRAM is widely available, and its unusual for consumer electronics manufacturers to “single source”–that is, rely upon a single supplier for an important component. The combined cost of memory on the 3DS worked out to $8.36, more than twice the cost of the memory found on the DSi.

Three chips related to the user interface cost a combined $6.81: an accelerometer from STMicroelectroncis, a gyroscope from Invensense, and an audio chip from Texas Instruments. Atheros, the Wi-Fi chipmaker that’s being acquired by Qualcomm, supplied a $5 Wi-Fi chip. TI and NEC supplied power management chips that cost $3.63. The 3DS contains three cameras, and though it’s not clear who supplied them–camera suppliers have gone to great lengths to hide their identities in recent years–iSuppli reckons their combined cost at $4.70.

Since I often get asked this question, let me say that iSuppli’s analysis focuses strictly on the materials used and doesn’t account for the cost to develop software or to license any patents. Nor does it account for the cost of any shipping or distribution or marketing. It’s just the raw cost of the hardware.

“At this point, we don’t know when we can go back to normal production,” said a Renesas spokeswoman, Makie Uehara.

Electronics and auto makers world-wide could be hurt by reduced output from Renesas, which makes key components.

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Levine is the third partner to join AH in recent months. In January it named HP and Opsware veteran Mark Cranney as a partner for market development. And in March it added IronPort’s Scott Weiss.

“Adding Peter makes us smarter at the firm on a certain class of products where he is much more experienced and goes much more in depth than we do, in areas like virtualization and storage,” AH co-founder Ben Horowitz told me. A key area of expertise is one that Levine developed specifically at Veritas, he said, that of working with manufacturers of infrastructure products. “Veritas was probably the most successful company in the history of enterprise software at the OEM model except for Microsoft,” Horowitz said. “It’s a very complicated thing to do–and a very complicated thing to do correctly–so he brings a specialized skill set to the table.”

Horowitz also said Levine will help AH expand its reach and find deals in places where it hasn’t had a presence before, places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where Levine is a lecturer. One example: Bromium, a stealth startup that AH says it is investing in. While Horowitz didn’t disclose the amount the firm is investing, he did describe Bromium as a “security plus virtualization company.”

“It’s the kind of deal we wouldn’t have known about without working with Peter,” Horowitz told me.

“We’re at the second generation of what you can do with virtualization,” Levine told me. “Companies like Citrix and XenSource did a lot of the hard rock-breaking to get chipset support from companies like Intel to support virtualization, and once they did that there was an opportunity to take virtualization to the next level. Bromium is a company that takes advantage of all that.”

Levine is continuing in his role as a vice president of Strategic Development at Citrix and will continue teaching a class on Technology Sales at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Previously, he was senior vice president and general manager of the Data Center and Cloud Division at Citrix, having joined that company in 2007 by way of its $500 million acquisition of XenSource, a provider of open-source virtualization sofware, where he was CEO. XenSource’s customers included Microsoft, Symantec, HP, NEC and Dell.

This will be Levine’s second go in the venture capital ring. He spent three years as a general partner at the Mayfield Fund and in that capacity served on the board of Consera Software, which was purchased by HP. He sat on the advisory board of VMWare and was an investor in Actona, which was ultimately acquired by Cisco Systems.

Levine first rose to prominence as an early employee of Veritas Software, and during his 11-year stint there helped to grow it to 5,000+ and more than $1.5B in annual revenue. His last job at Veritas was executive VP, where he was responsible for worldwide marketing, OEM sales, business development and several product divisions. Before that, he was a software engineer at MIT and worked on Project Athena, an early-1980s research project to build a campus-wide distributed computing network that turned out to be a forerunner of the kind of corporate networks we now use every day.

Now a product developed by Japan’s NEC Corp. could allow image-conscious joggers to operate their music machinery without risking mishap: The electronics maker’s new technology uses the human arm as a remote control for electronic devices, and while NEC is still figuring out what to use the technology for exactly, the most obvious application would be music players, a spokesman said, though it may also work well with videogame systems. All the runner would need to do would be to tap the left arm with the right hand, or vice versa, and the music could be played, paused or skipped.

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But NEC, Hitachi and Casio are denying these reports anyway. Or rather, they’re denying that they’ve hammered out any sort of deal. “The media report out today is not something that the company has released,” NEC said in a statement. “It is also not true that we have made a decision regarding our cell phone operations.”

Yet.

A nasty turn for a company that hasn’t posted a loss in six years and has long been one of the Japanese electronics industry’s strongest performers. Now, as consumer spending slumps worldwide, even Panasonic (PC) has stumbled. And according to Panasonic director, Makoto Uenoyama, it will be a while before the company regains its balance. “We expect sharper sales declines in this quarter, and profits are likely to shrink in every segment,” he said at a news conference. “We think it will take more than one year, more like two years, to work through this environment.”

Most of the cuts will come from NEC’s chip, electronic component and LCD display divisions, with 40 percent being made in Japan and the rest overseas. “We are aiming for 20,000 or more,” NEC President Kaoru Yano told a press conference today. “It is regrettable that we have to announce such a big downgrade. We must cut waste.”

Indeed, it must. NEC’s net losses rose an astonishing 13-fold in the past nine months, rising to 129 billion yen, up from 9.98 billion yen a year earlier.

Most of the cuts will come from NEC’s chip, electronic component and LCD display divisions, with 40 percent being made in Japan and the rest overseas. “We are aiming for 20,000 or more,” NEC President Kaoru Yano told a press conference today. “It is regrettable that we have to announce such a big downgrade. We must cut waste.”

Indeed, it must. NEC’s net losses rose an astonishing 13-fold in the past nine months, rising to 129 billion yen, up from 9.98 billion yen a year earlier.