Google’s Android platform has no doubt dominated the mobile OS market, but it appears the company is still pursuing even further saturation, looking to make their own chipsets as well. According to a new report from Reuters, the company is building a new team of engineers in Bengaluru at a new semiconductor manufacturing site that has been developed in South India. According to the report, the team already consists of 16 engineers and 4 recruiters with the intent of rapidly increasing the headcount further. The company is not just looking to train new people to make chips for them though as the company has reportedly already hired engineers from Intel, NVidia and Qualcomm, giving them broad expertise in the chipset making business already.
It is definitely a bi move by the tech company hat further signals their intent to want to move away from the big chipmakers and rather create chipsets that are more uniquely suited to their own devices. This is not necessarily a new strategy, as the likes of Apple has also started bringing more chip designing in-house, though they still rely on the chipmakers ot build out there visions. Google’s attempt will mean it will not just design chipsets, but manufacture them internally too.
It’s a move which could certainly shake up the industry and see the other manufacturers up their game in terms of the types of chips they may produce. It’s not clear if Google will look to change their strategy in supporting multiple chipsets through their operating system, though given the success Apple has had in locking down their devices to work on only certain chipsets, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google eventually goes down this road.
Whereas the industry used to keep their hardware and software separate from each other it looks like a new trend for big tech companies is to bring hardware back in-
Last Updated: February 12, 2019
HvR
February 12, 2019 at 16:15
“chip manufacturers taken over by big tech giants”
Pretty sure there are no small chip manufacturers left, there haven’t been for the better part of 2 decades. When they got down to nm scale it just too expensive to set up silicone fabricators that pretty much only a multi-billion dollar company can get into the business and maintain it.
That is why Qaulcom has always been happy for other companies to manufacture their chips or just their tech and why AMD went fabless a decade ago. Same with all the smaller players like Motorola, Siemens, Hyundai, LG etc spun out their semiconductor businesses into separate independent entities