Samsung and Oppo Seek to Rival iPhone A-Series Chips With Custom Designs and TSMC Fabrication

Samsung and Oppo are planning to transition to custom silicon chips to rival Apple's A-series chips in the iPhone, according to recent reports.

Earlier this year, Chinese smartphone brand Oppo launched its first custom silicon chip, the MariSilicon X image processor, in the Find X5. Now, the company's chip design team is developing an application processor (AP) and an entire custom System on Chip (SoC) for future Oppo devices, IT Home reports. Like Apple's custom silicon chips, Oppo is looking to TSMC to manufacture its chips.

IT Home suggests that Oppo will launch its custom AP, manufactured with TSMC's 6nm process, in 2023. This will reportedly be followed by a full SoC, integrating the AP and modem, manufactured with TSMC's 4nm process, in 2024. The chips may not be comparable to offerings from Qualcomm and Mediatek in terms of efficiency and fabrication processes, but they could be adopted in entry-level mobile products first before increasing market penetration over time.

Meanwhile, iNews 24 reports that Samsung smartphone chief Roh Tae-moon told a company town hall meeting that "we will make an AP unique to the Galaxy." The push toward custom silicon chips is reportedly being driven by GPS issues and poor thermal performance caused by the Exynos 2200 chip in Samsung's latest Galaxy S22 series of smartphones. Samsung hopes that it will be able to mirror Apple in taking multiple considerations into account with its custom chips instead simply of putting performance at the forefront.

The movement is seemingly part of a trend of increasing ambition from Android smartphone brands to rival Apple more directly and become the world's biggest smartphone brand, with Oppo laying out plans to aggressively compete in the high-end smartphone market and Xiaomi pledging a "war of life and death" against Apple.