LG Electronics, a major consumer electronics company, has aggressive plans to expand shipments of its smartphones and create much more powerful smart HDTVs with high-end operating system. As it appears, besides expansion of sales of existing devices, the company also has aggressive plans to develop its own system-on-chips, which should improve its profit margins and allow to provide unique user experience.

LG’s first high-end system-on-chip will feature four high-performance ARM Cortex-A15 and four low-power/energy-efficient ARM Cortex-A7 cores inside its processor code-named Odin. Thanks to ARM Big.Little technology, the system-on-chip will assign different cores for different tasks to provide both high performance and long battery life. The chip will be produced using 28nm process technology with high-K metal gate. The LG Odin chip will compete against Exynos Octs multi-core solution recently unveiled by the arch-rival Samsung Electronics and therefore will make solutions on its base competitive with those to be offered by Samsung later this year.

“'LG Electronics is going to mass-produce the Odin processors by using finer 28nm [with] high-k metal gate (HKMG) technology. The processors will be used in LG’s next flagship Optimus smartphone ― the Optimus GII ― which will probably be unveiled in this fall’s IFA trade fair,” said an LG official by telephone, in a conversation with the Korea Times web-site.

At present it is projected that LG Odin will power LG Optimus G II smartphone due sometimes in Q4 2013. Given the performance offered by eight-core processor, it is logical for LG to also introduce a media tablet with the chip.

While LG does not reveal its possible tablet plans, it admits that it wants to significantly strengthen its chip design division. Such a decision means that the company will reduce buying of third-party application processors, which will boost its profitability and will allow to integrate unique technologies into its chips.

''CEO Koo Bon-joon is injecting more resources in smartphone-related projects to fully revive the business. LG is striving to transform itself into a major fabless chip-making firm by increasing the number of its qualified chip designers and giving authority to associated divisions. ''We want to be much more independent to have power both in parts and finished-goods like Samsung by improving our in-house chips,” the spokesman for the company is reported to have said.

Tags: LG, ARM, Cortex, Big.Little, 28nm, Samsung, Qualcomm, Snapdragon, LG Electronics