Exclusive: Lenovo to design own chips
Junko Yoshida
While beefing up its senior management team to prepare itself to become a leading consumer electronics vendor, Lenovo is growing its IC design team to about 100 engineers by mid this year.
BEIJING, China– Lenovo, the second largest smartphone supplier in China, will get into the chip design business with a special focus on smartphones and tablets, EE Times has learned.
The company, which has maintained a small IC design team consisting of about 10 people over the last decade, is now committed to expanding this team to about 100 engineers by the middle of this year, according to a China-based industry source with direct knowledge of Lenovo’s recruitment of chip designers.
Lenovo will be hiring 40 engineers in Shenzhen area and 60 in Beijing, according to the source, who asked to remain anonymous.
Lenovo, based in Beijing, did not immediately respond to questions about these plans.
This initiative appears to be driven by the company’s desire to control its own destiny in smartphones and tablets--a la HiSilicon at Huawei. (HiSilicon is a chip division of Huawei.)
Unlike Samsung or Apple, Lenovo has a checkered history of adopting different apps processors from a variety of suppliers for its smartphones. The company adopted MediaTek’s MT6573 in the Lenovo A60 smartphone in 2011, while it became the first company--outside Samsung --in 2012 to design in Samsung Electronics’ quad-core apps processor Exynos 4 in its LePhone K860.
Lenovo, however, announced earlier this year a 5.5-inch smartphone, dubbed K900, by integrating Intel’s first dual-core Atom chip for phones. The Atom Z2580 is said to have roughly doubled the CPU performance of Intel’s single-core Medfield processor used in Lenovo’s K800 phone, which was introduced a year ago.
While Lenovo might have been enjoying its freedom in choosing the best apps processor available on the market, reality bit hard, sources said, when Samsung Electronics refused to supply its newest version of the Exynos apps processor to the Chinese company.
Market share of the top five vendors for China’s smartphone market in 2012
Source: Strategy Analytics
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Indeed, on the growing Chinese smartphone market last year, Lenovo became Samsung’s biggest rival--with Samsung holding a 17.7 percent share, with Lenovo at 13.2 percent and Apple at 11 percent.
Meanwhile, Lenovo has been beefing up its senior management team to prepare itself to become a leading consumer electronics vendor.
The world's second-largest supplier of personal computers last month (February) named Jerry Yang, the co-founder and former CEO of Yahoo, as a "board observer.” Further, Lenovo added Tudor Brown, one of the founders of ARM, as a non-executive director to Lenovo's roster of seasoned veterans.
It’s far from clear if an internal group of mere 100 IC engineers can make a dent in the already crowded apps processor market. And yet, as Shao Yang, CMO of Huawei Device, recently said in an interview with EE Times, having a chip division of its own could help [the handset company] “negotiate better with other semiconductor companies.”
