#ICYMI: Xiaomi forms own chip development department

The department will be leased by a former Qualcomm senior director.

File photo: Xiaomi 15

New venture

Xiaomi recently announced the formation of its chip platform department under its mobile phone product team.

Citing a report from ITHome, Gizmochina reported that the team will be headed by Qin Muyun, who previously served as Qualcomm's senior director. He will directly report to Lei Jun, the founder and CEO of Xiaomi.

The tech giant started exploring opportunities in chip design in 2017 through its Pengpai S1 SoC, an 8-core 64-bit processor based on a 28nm process first used in the Xiaomi 5C that failed to gain traction.

Despite this, Xiaomi continued to develop chips, rolling out its other products for different purposes. This includes the Pengpai C series for imaging, the P series for fast charging, the G series for power management, the T series for signal enhancement, and the D series for display control.

These chips haven't replaced core processors but have helped Xiaomi gradually build expertise across the hardware stack. Now it seems like the company has the confidence to build its full-stack smartphone SoC.

It has been reported that Xiaomi is in the last stage of developing a 3nm SoC chip. There are also reports that the upcoming Xiaomi 15S Pro might launch featuring this in-house chip.

What do you guys think?

Via: ITHome, Gizmochina, Xiaomitime