oppo: Oppo joins the race to develop its own smartphone chips – Times of India

Oppo is developing its own high-end chips which should be implemented in its flagships as early as 2023, reports The Verge. Oppo reportedly wants to use TSMC’s advanced 3nm process technology for the chips.
Oppo currently uses chips from Qualcomm and MediaTek, like all other Chinese smartphone vendors since the crackdown on Huawei.
Xiaomi designed and released a low-end SoC called the Surge S1 for its budget Mi 5C phone in 2017, but since then its chip design efforts have been limited to secondary components like image signal processors.
Oppo would be the latest major smartphone manufacturer to take control of its own SoC design. Recently, Google launched the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro, its first phones with a custom SoC, called Tensor.
Apple and Samsung also design their own smartphone chips, as did Huawei before US sanctions curtailed its mobile business.
According to IDC, Oppo is the fourth-largest smartphone maker in the world by shipments. Qualcomm could lose out on business if major companies like Oppo were to take on SoC design themselves.
It is also part of the BBK Electronics conglomerate which shares a supply chain with Vivo, OnePlus and Realme meaning if the Oppo in-house chipset does come along we could see it in devices from the aforementioned brands down the line.