Half a year after the dissolution of Zheku, where did the chip talents go?

Automobile core making takes over the baton of mobile phone core making.

Text丨Zhang Jiahao

Editor丨Cheng Manqi

In May 2023, OPPO's self-developed chip subsidiary, Zheku Technology, which was founded in 2019, announced the dissolution of more than 3,000 employees from the chip design company that aims to develop its own flagship mobile phone SoC (Sytstem on Chips), a mobile phone main chip that fully integrates CPU, GPU, communication and other modules. At the dissolution communication meeting, Zheku's executives described the reasons for the closure of Zheku: the global economic environment and the mobile phone industry are not optimistic, the company's revenue does not meet expectations, and the company cannot afford to invest in chip self-development.

Just two days before the disbandment, Zheku's 4nm mobile phone SoC had been sent to the foundry for tape-out, and could be installed on OPPO's flagship phones as early as early 2024.

According to "LatePost", after the disbandment of Zheku, only a few personnel joined OPPO's internal chip team.

The team now has about 100 people, including Jiang Bo, the original chip product leader of Zhekuyuan, who serves as the head of the OPPO chip team. Jiang Bo was the first smartphone SoC product manager at Qualcomm in China, and was one of the early backbones to join Zheku. The OPPO chip team is now mainly responsible for communicating with chip suppliers such as Qualcomm and MediaTek about chip customization requirements and chip architecture tuning.

The OPPO Find and Reno series, which have been in use since 2022 and are designed by Zheku, have also been confirmed not to be updated.

The dissolution of Zheku is a microcosm of the collective setback of China's consumer electronics companies' core-making boom.

From 2023 to the present, in addition to Zheku, there are also Meizu Interstellar and Moxing Semiconductor, a core manufacturing company under TCL, have successively announced the termination of core manufacturing projects. The chips developed by these companies are mainly used in mobile phones and TVs.

A headhunter said that an engineer went to Davis after the closure of Zheku, experienced two disbandments in half a year, and took two "gift packages".

"LatePost" learned that Dingdao Zhixin, a core-making subsidiary established by Lenovo in 2022, will also start layoffs, accounting for about 20%. At the end of 2022, it was rumored in the market that the 5nm tablet chip designed by Dingdao Zhixin had been successfully taped out.

Today, in addition to Huawei HiSilicon, the only team in China that is still insisting on self-developed mobile phone SoC is Xiaomi Xuanjie. The company was established at the end of 2021 and its legal representative is Zeng Xuezhong, senior vice president of Xiaomi. "LatePost" learned that the Xuanjie team has also absorbed some former Zheku engineers, and the mobile phone SoC designed by Xuanjie has made some progress.

After consumer electronics companies, one of the main industries that has taken over the core manufacturing boom is smart electric vehicles.

Based on the information of many headhunters, BYD and Momenta are the two companies that absorb the most talents from Zheku Z6 and M2 and above. (Z is the technical sequence of Zheku, the highest is Z7, Z6 is the manager level; M is the management sequence of Zheku, the highest is M4) Another technical person in charge of Zheku joined Huixi Intelligence, an autonomous driving chip company.

In the four years between its establishment and its dissolution, Zheku developed the image processing chip Mariana X and the Bluetooth audio chip Mariana Y, which were used in OPPO mobile phones. By the end of 2022, more than 10 million Mariana X units had been shipped.

Zheku's talents were absorbed by the industry within 2 months. A number of chip industry headhunters told LatePost that Zheku engineers with sufficient experience generally increased their salaries by more than 30% after joining the new company.

According to "Late Auto", around June 2023, Zhou Yan, the former director of Zheku, joined the embedded product center of BYD's sixth business division. When Yan Zhou was in Zheku, he was mainly involved in the IP design of SoC chips.

According to the report of "Launch PowerOn", Li Zonglin, former COO of Zheku, Jia Mingjun, vice president of Zheku GPU, Yu Guojun, senior director of Zheku SoC 2 Department, and nearly 10 of their middle management members joined Momenta to set up a new department to develop autonomous driving chips. It is understood that the team has about 30 people, mainly front-end engineers.

"LatePost" also learned that Wang Zongjing, one of the former heads of Zheku verification, joined Huixi Intelligence, an autonomous driving chip company. Huixi was co-founded by Xu Ningyi, former head of the hardware computing group of Microsoft's Asian Research Institute, and Zhang Jianyong, former vice president of autonomous driving at NIO, and has received investment from NIO Capital, Xiaomi Group and Shunwei Capital.

AI chip and CPU companies for cloud servers have also attracted a number of Zheku talents. This is another popular direction in addition to core building for automobiles: core building for AI computing power.

According to LatePost, Zhai Fan, the former head of Zheku's media chips, has joined Pingtouge, a chip company under Alibaba, and Wang Jincheng, the former head of Zheku's backend, has joined Hongjun Microelectronics, a high-performance Arm CPU startup, which was founded in 2021.

Hao Liu, one of the leaders of Zheku's SoC, and Sun Chengkun, director of the NPU chip center, joined Arm's joint venture in China, Arm Technology, and Hao Liu served as vice president of product research and development. Sun Chengkun used to be the head of the AI direction of the former overseas team of Bichen Technology, and experienced dissolution less than a month after joining Zheku.

In addition, some Zheku personnel returned to Zhanrui, MediaTek and other mobile phone chip suppliers.

Another option for high-level chip talents in Zheku is to start their own business. "LatePost" learned that around June 2023, Zhekuben had a team that wanted to set up a new company for in-vehicle chips.

If it is placed in 2021, it is not difficult for chip talents with many years of technical management experience to pull in the first round of financing, but in 2023, when chip design investment is cold, this entrepreneurial plan does not talk about enough first round of investment.

According to Qichacha data, in 2023, more than 10,000 chip-related enterprises in China have been cancelled or revoked, an increase of nearly 90% from more than 5,700 in 2022.

The growth of intermediate links such as chips needs to be driven by "downstream locomotives". Some of Zheku's technical backbones have joined automotive companies such as BYD and Momenta, behind which smart electric vehicles have replaced mobile phones and become a new engine for China's chip growth.

Last year, China's new energy vehicle production and sales increased by nearly 36% and 38% year-on-year, respectively. According to IDC data, global smartphone, PC and tablet shipments will continue to decline in 2023, and smartphone sales will fall to a decade low.

Among the smart electric vehicle supply chain companies, in addition to companies mainly engaged in automotive chips such as Horizon and Black Sesame, software companies such as Momenta are also recruiting to form chip teams, which may provide solutions integrating software and hardware in the future.

Car companies with more funds have invested more in self-developed chips, and the salaries offered are also higher, bringing more talent competition to the industry.

"Late Auto" previously mentioned that Weilai, Ideal, and Xiaopeng have successively set up self-developed chip teams since 2020 to lay out intelligent driving chips. Ideal also cooperated with San'an Optoelectronics to build power semiconductor production capacity.

Among them, NIO's chip team has the largest number of people, reaching 300 people at one point in 2022. In 2023, NIO has successively released its self-developed LiDAR chip and intelligent driving chip. NIO's R&D expenses in the first three quarters of the year also reached 9.46 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 38%.

BYD, which is known for its vertical integration, is investing heavily in intelligent driving and has set up an intelligent driving team of about 4,000 people. BYD will also recruit more chip talents in 2023 to serve BYD's smart ability make-up class.

Qiu Hao also contributed to this article.

Image source: Dunkirk