Has Xiaomi Given Up Its Chip Production? Obviously No!

After Surge S1, Xiaomi hasn’t talked about its chip production much. At least, there were not many official statements. Does this mean Xiaomi has given up this project? Obviously not.

According to the latest news, Xiaomi’s Hubei Xiaomi Changjiang Industrial Fund Partnership (Limited Partnership) has invested in Weiyuan Microelectronics (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., and the legal representative is Xiaomi CFO Zhou, which currently holds 6.25% of shares. The latter’s considered to be the fourth largest shareholder of the latter.

VeriSilicon is a platform-based chip design service provider that provides IP-centric, platform-based chip customization services, and one-stop point-to-point semiconductor design services, focusing on mobile connected devices, data centers, and objects. It performs in a variety of end markets such as networking (IoT), wearables, smart homes, and automotive electronics. Recently, VeriSilicon Microelectronics has vigorously carried out many cooperation agreements, mainly in the depth of research on AI chips and computing power.

For this shareholding, industry analysts said that Xiaomi’s move is to enable the NPU processing capability on the silicon chip. This investment will bring more technical and computing support to Xiaomi’s SoC.

In September last year, Songguo Electronics, a subsidiary of Xiaomi Group, officially announced that it has entered into a cooperative relationship with Zhongtianwei of Ali, and based on Zhongtianwei’s RISC-V CPU processor, Songguo Electronics provides SoC intelligent hardware products. Also, it promotes and accelerates the commercialization of RISC-V in China.

In order to achieve better development, the Songguo Electronics team, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Xiaomi, was reorganized. At the same time, some of the teams split up and formed a new company, such as Nanjing Dayu Semiconductor. Thus, they began independent financing. After this adjustment, Xiaomi holds a 25% stake in Nanjing Big Fish Semiconductor, and the team collectively holds 75%. Nanjing Dayu Semiconductor will focus on technology development of IoT chips and solutions in the semiconductor field, and Songguo will continue to focus on mobile SoC chip development.

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