Xiaomi has been rumored to be working on its very own smartphone chip for a while now. Looks like the company has now reached an important milestone.
A report by Chinese media MyDrivers suggests that Xiami has successfully “taped out” the country’s first 3nm smartphone SoC.
The announcement came from the Chief Economist of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology on BRTV, a government-owned television network in China. Below is the announcement video of the same, in Chinese of course, posted by an X user.
Xiaomi’s own smartphone SoC?
The report doesn’t provide details about the CPU or GPU and only mentions that it is a 3nm chip. It also doesn’t specify whether Xiaomi is using TSMC, Samsung, or another node for production.
However, the “tape-out” process in silicon design means the chip has reached the final stage before it’s sent to the manufacturing facility for production. In other words, Xiaomi has successfully completed the design phase and the chip is now ready for fabrication.
That said, this doesn’t mean the SoC is ready for mass production or smartphone use yet. Xiaomi will still need to test the chip once it’s fabricated by a manufacturer like TSMC or Samsung. Also, if the initial yield (the percentage of working chips) is low, they may need to tweak the manufacturing process or the chip design to improve it.
In case you didn’t know, Xiaomi has already released a smartphone with its own SoC. The Mi 5C, launched in 2017, featured Xiaomi’s Pengpai (or Pinecone) S1 chip, a 28nm, 8-core processor with a big-little architecture and a maximum clock speed of 2.2GHz.
While Xiaomi hasn’t launched another smartphone SoC since then, it has been developing chips for charging, battery management, and image signal processing in its Surge G, P, and C series. For instance, the Xiaomi 14 Ultra uses the Surge P2 and G1 chips to improve charging efficiency and extend battery life.
So, chip production certianly isn’t an unfamiliar territory for Xiaomi. It remains to be seen if the company can successfully develop and launch its own smartphone SoC (again), and how it will stack up in terms of performance.
(Source)
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