Lenovo may be designing its own mobile processors for tablets and smartphones

Lenovo is one of the world’s largest PC vendors and the second largest smartphone supplier in China after Samsung. The Chinese multinational is just one of the 100 different domestic companies selling smartphones. China is currently the largest smartphone market in the world and brands such as Lenovo, Huawei, Coolpad, TCL, and ZTE are responsible for the majority of devices sold. However most of those sales are low-end devices, while Apple and Samsung account for a large share of high-end sales.

Apparently Chinese smartphone companies like Lenovo are evolving into smartphone giants on the shoulders of chipmakers like Qualcomm and MediaTek. Purchasing ready-made chip designs takes a lot of the R&D load off companies like Lenovo but according to Bloomberg’s Bruce Einhorn, “The plug-and-play model doesn't work for more expensive, feature-rich phones. There, Apple and Samsung still dominate”.

Now the EE Times is reporting that Lenovo will be designing its own mobile processors for tablets and smartphones. Apparently the company had maintained a small group of 10 IC designers over the past decade and now wants to expand that to around 100 engineers within the next few months.

The processor-agnostic company has used MediaTek’s MT6573 in its A60 smartphone, an Exynos 4 in its LePhone K860, and recently announced the K900 integrating Intel’s Atom Z2580. Recently though, the company was jolted by Samsung’s refusal to provide Lenovo with the latest Exynos processors.

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