Vivo to launch first smart chip “Yueying”
On July 19, Vivo is reported to build its first self-developed chip with the internal codename of “Yueying”. However, the further functional details of the chip are still unclear, there are speculations that it is used to improve imaging capabilities.
In May 2020, two chip trademarks applications by Vivo were exposed on the Internet: the “Vivo SOC” and the “Vivo chip”. These two trademarks were applied in September 2019. Their product categories covered include CPUs, processor-related products such as modems, computer chips, printed circuits, and computer storage devices. The date of the trademark application was near the timeframe Vivo denied that it was developing its own chips.
On September 23, 2019, Hu Baishan, executive VP of Vivo, said in an interview that Vivo indeed began to think about deep participation in chip SoC design as early as 18 months ago.
Vivo had already launched a plan to recruit a large number of chip talents and proposed to build a chip team of 300–500 people, but this team is not a pure chip research and development team.
Hu Baishan said: “In order to better meet the needs of consumers, we have chosen to deeply participate in the R&D process of upstream manufacturers. Based on this need, Vivo has begun to go deep into the initial design stage of SoC chips.” He said that the first step for Vivo is to build chip-defining capability and whether it needs to continue deeper afterward depends on the situation.
