Asian Tech Press (Dec 8) -- Chinese smartphone maker Oppo announced on Wednesday that it will unveil the results of its first self-developed chip at the annual OPPO INNO DAY on Dec. 14.

The self-developed chip that Oppo is about to reveal is likely to be a low-power Neural Processing Unit (NPU), manufactured with TSMC's 6nm process technology, which is very costly, according to information surfaced online.

Sources say that this self-research chip has completed its tapeout in June this year, and is expected to be mass-produced for commercial use soon.

If the news is true, Oppo will become one of the manufacturers in China who can design and mass-produce commercial 6nm chips, the other three being Huawei's Hisilicon subsidiary, Taiwan-based MediaTek Inc. and Alibaba Group.

At OPPO INNO DAY 2019, Oppo founder Tony Chen had announced that he would invest 50 billion yuan in R&D in the next three years, which means that the smartphone maker has made sufficient preparations for a self-developed chip.

In addition to the financial investment, Oppo has now a team of over 2,000 employees for chip research and development, according to industry media reports, with most of the team's R&D staff coming from companies with relevant technology experience like Qualcomm and Intel.

At present, China's major cell phone manufacturers have made efforts to chip industry. Besides Huawei's Hisilicon, which has been developed for the longest time and is the most mature, Xiaomi and Vivo have also launched their own chips, the Surge S1 and the V1 respectively.