Vivo to Develop Own Chip, Seeks to Improve Imaging Capability

Jiemian News reported on Monday that Vivo looks to be moving towards developing its own chips for its devices, a first for the company, but details on the procedure and process were scant. The chips are rumoured to be focused on improving the imaging capabilities of the company’s handset devices.

As early as May last year, netizens noticed that Vivo had applied for two chip trademarks, named “Vivo SOC” and “vivo chip”. The trademarks were applied for in September 2019 and the categories covered including a series of processor-related products such as CPU, modem, computer chip, printed circuit and computer storage device.

The date of the trademark application is close to the time when Vivo denied that it was developing its own chipset. On September 23, 2019, Hu Baishan, executive vice president of Vivo, said in an interview that the company was thinking about participating in chip SoC design as early as a year and a half ago. Vivo started recruiting a large number of engineers and others who would work on the chipset team. The company indicated that it planned to establish a chip team of 300-500 people in the future, but this team would also proceed other development plans in addition to making chips.

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Hu Baishan then said: “In order to better meet the needs of consumers, we chose to deeply participate in the R&D process of upstream manufacturers. Based on this need, Vivo began to go deep into the initial design stage of SoC chips.”

He said that the first step was to build the ability to define chips, and whether to continue in depth after that would depend on how things move along.