According to Electronics Times, the Korean vernacular daily newspaper, HiSilicon, China's No.1 fabless chip maker, has signed a foundry chip-making contract to outsource the fabrication of its own designed mobile SoC.
Under the contact, Samsung Electronics will fabricate HiSilicon's Kirin mobile application processor chip, the brain of smart phones with its 14nm FinFET process.
The foundry chip business is a sort of contract chip fabrication business that designs none of its own chip, but just fabricates other chipmakers' chip design.
Samsung has been fabricating Apple Inc.'s A9 mobile SoC chip with its own proprietary 14nm FinFET.
The win of the foundry contract with Chinese chipmaker marks the first of its kind ever that Samsung has signed with Chinese fables chipmaker. As a growing army of Chinese fabless chipmaker are now thriving on booming domestic demand for a wide spectrum of SoC solutions from mobile APs to modem chips, the contract will likely give a much-needed launching pad for the Korean foundry maker to seize more orders for foundry chip businesses.
HiSilicon is the world's 7th largest mobile SoC chip maker for smart phones racing ahead of Intel. It made up 1.8% of the mobile AP market, in the second quarter of fiscal 2015, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics