The Chinese smartphone manufacturer Oppo, which has now firmly established itself in the top 5 of the world's largest suppliers of mobile devices, allegedly wants to start mass production of the first powerful processor from its own development this year.
According to the Taiwanese industry service DigiTimes, which cites sources from the industry, Oppo wants to have its own smartphone processors manufactured in the third quarter of 2023.
The first chip is said to be produced by the Taiwanese contract manufacturer TSMC, where Oppo wants to use a 4nm node.
Modern 4nm SoC with external 5G modem?
The design and the first prototypes of its first own ARM chip for smartphones are said to be completed by Oppo by the end of the second quarter, which is then to be followed by mass production with a structure width of four nanometers at TSMC.
It would be the first time that Oppo's long-held strategy of developing its own processors for smartphones bears fruit.
So far, the MariSilicon series has already introduced some auxiliary chips from its own development, which take on tasks such as processing artificial intelligence and Bluetooth.
Some time ago, however, they started recruiting developers to work on CPUs on a large scale and setting up a corresponding department.
It remains to be seen how extensive Oppo's use of its own processors will be initially since the company can of course only equip certain products with them at first.
The range of functions also remains somewhat limited, because according to the report from Taiwan, Oppo initially wants to use an external 5G modem from the supplier MediaTek and not integrate its own solution into its first system-on-chip design.
One of the reasons for this might be the complexity of such a task, but on the other hand, patent law issues might also play a role, after all the owners of patents on certain technologies could prevent their use in Oppo's own modem.
Apple has been struggling with similar problems for years and will therefore probably continue to use a 5G modem from Qualcomm until at least 2025.