Smartphone giant Xiaomi is one of China’s top three investors in semiconductor development on the back of a 10-year, 50 billion yuan (US$6.9 billion) spending programme, according to company founder, chairman and chief executive Lei Jun. In a Monday post on Chinese microblogging site Weibo, Lei wrote that Xiaomi achieved the milestone as of April after spending 13.5 billion yuan and deploying 2,500 research-and-development (R&D) staff to work on its XRing O1 system-on-a-chip (SoC). The new...