Chinese smartphone OEM Oppo has announced that it is shutting down its silicon design unit, due to a slowdown in smartphone sales. While more of a problem in the Chinese consumer market, only Apple appears to have escaped this fall in demand, and it is unclear when this bad weather will pass. The Zeku unit, which was set up in 2019, had achieved promising results. These were centered around its MariSilicon neural processing unit (NPU), which was intended to provide image recognition and analytics. The chip featured in the Oppo Find X phone, and Zeku unveiled an audio-focused Bluetooth chip in December 2022. Chinese OEMs have been pushed towards in-house semiconductor designs by the USA’s trade embargos and political pressure.…