Xiaomi starts its own chip production again

According to semiconductor industry observers, Xiaomi is recruiting a team to re-enter the mobile phone chip market. Xiaomi is currently in licensing negotiations with related manufacturers, but the company has already started recruiting teams.

“Xiaomi's ultimate goal is definitely to produce mobile phone chips, but their first chip will not necessarily be a mobile phone chip, but will start with peripheral chips." (translated from Chinese)

Already in October 2014, Xiaomi established a 100%-owned subsidiary in Beijing Songguo Electronics and entered the chip manufacturing business. At that time Xiaomi CEO announcement was "Starting with 1 billion yuan, spending 1 billion dollars and 10 years of results". Finally, after three years, Xiaomi's first in-house developed SoC chip, the Surging S1, was born. Xiaomi became the fourth in-house developed mobile phone chip manufacturer after Apple, Samsung and Huawei.

On 30 March 2021, Xiaomi launched its own C1 chip for image signal processing, which was introduced in the Mi Mix Fold. Xiaomi CEO said at a press conference today that despite the setbacks, the development will continue.

The Surge S1 processor was introduced in 2017 in the Xiaomi Mi 5C phone Xiaomi CEO. It made quite a splash then, as it took a big bite out of the performance pie alongside rivals Qualcomm, MediaTek and Kiryn. We were very excited about this at the time, as the Xiaomi SoC was beating the market in both performance and price. Would you like Xiaomi to start making its own processors again?