SHANGHAI (Reuters – Oppo, a Chinese smartphone manufacturer, unveiled Tuesday a brand new chip that it had self-developed. The move by the hardware company further cements its position in the semiconductor market.

MariSilicon X (or the chip) is a neural processor unit (NPU). It improves photographs and videos taken on smartphones.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd 6 nanometre process technology was used to manufacture it. The device will go into the Find X series smartphones by the company, which will arrive on the market in early 2022.

Canalys reports that Oppo, China’s number one phone manufacturer, holds 21% of China’s domestic market in the third quarter of 2021.

BBK Electronics owns the company, as well as Vivo, a top-selling Chinese smartphone manufacturer. Both companies are competing for customers but share a common supply chain.

Both companies are heavily investing in the chip industry. Oppo, along with MariSilicon X has developed a power management chips that can be used to charge its chargers.

Vivo had announced in September it had created an image signal processing chip (ISP) that it would use for its phones.

This chip initiative is in conjunction with the government’s push to encourage Chinese businesses to develop the country’s chip sector. The domestic chip sector has been lagging behind other East Asian economies for decades.

Last year, U.S. sanctions on Shenzhen’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd made it impossible for the company to source key components. This brought out the need for an independent chip industry.

These measures have crippled both the smartphone division of the company and HiSilicon’s in-house chip department HiSilicon. HiSilicon was once the sole Chinese unit that developed smartphone processors comparable to Qualcomm (NASDAQ:) Inc.

After the COVID-19 crisis, there has been a worldwide shortage of semiconductors.