However, the victory of market share is only the first step for China smart phone brands to win. How to extend the advantage of market share to the advantage of technology has become a new topic for major domestic manufacturers. The latest report from Tencent's Deep Web shows that OPPO, a domestic first-line mobile phone manufacturer, is about to release its own ISP chip, that is, the image signal processor, which is expected to be installed on the flagship product Find X4 series in early 2022.
More importantly, in addition to ISP chips (image signal processors), OPPO is advancing the plan of self-developed SOC chips, which will replace some chips in Qualcomm and MediaTek in the future. At present, the OPPO self-developed chip project team has about thousands of people, and the core members are mainly from international first-class chip research and development enterprises such as MediaTek.
In fact, whether it is ISP chip (image signal processor) or SOC chip plan, we are not surprised by the news of OPPO, because OPPO has already laid out its own research chip. As early as February 2020, it has been nearly a year and a half since the special assistant to OPPO CEO released the Mariana plan on self-developed chips. Well-known bloggers' digital chat stations have made it clear that the first project produced by OPPO's Mariana plan will be made public soon, but it is not the most anticipated mobile phone SOC chip, but other types of chips.
According to the incomplete statistics of microgrid, in the past two years, OPPO has invested in more than 8 companies in the semiconductor field, including Nanxin Semiconductor, Shanghai Han Wei, Micro Capacitor Electronics, Changjing Technology and Zhao Wei Semiconductor. Taking Nanxin Semiconductor as an example, the company focuses on power management fields such as lithium battery related charging management, charge pump /DCDC/ACDC power conversion, wired/wireless fast charging protocol, lithium battery protection, etc., and has a certain voice in the whole battery field.
At the same time of core-building, OPPO is also constantly strengthening the moat of the entire technology patent, including the patent layout in many fields such as 5G, fast charging, artificial intelligence AI, and imaging, and is at the forefront of the industry. Relevant data show that as of June 30th, 20021year, OPPO has applied for more than 65,000 patents worldwide and granted more than 30,000 patents worldwide, including 5G communication standard patents, 3,900+home global patent applications, 2,500 AI patent applications, 8,800 image patent applications and 3,000 fast charging patent applications. The whole patent layout.
Compared with European, American, Japanese and Korean companies, it is an indisputable fact that China's chip manufacturing industry has a weak foundation, a late start and a slow development. Domestic manufacturers represented by OPPO have made cores, not only to get rid of product homogeneity, but also to master core technologies themselves. Image performance is the core selling point of high-end mobile phones at present, and the difficulty of ISP is much less than that of SoC. Therefore, starting with a dedicated ISP chip with a lower threshold is obviously a more robust self-developed chip model. I believe OPPO, an ISP chip, won't keep us waiting too long.