Xiaomi has quickly risen to a dominant force in China’s smartphone markets, besting both Huawei and Samsung in Q1 2015. Perhaps it’s fitting then that the smartphone company is now looking to begin designing products using its own custom processors. Rather that swallowing the huge expense that would be associated with setting up its own processor design team, Xiaomi has partnered up with fabless chip company Leadcore.
Marshal Cheng, vice president of Leadcore, has confirmed that the company is working with Xiaomi on “all three different levels — product, technology and patent”. The latter is particularly important, as Xiaomi has been looking to build on its rather small patent portfolio to help better defend itself as the company expands into competitive overseas territories. Importantly, Leadcore also owns some technologies for Chinese TD-SCDMA 3G standard and has access to LTE and LTE-A patents.
