LG Electronics joined the ranks of device makers offering its own application processors, a move it said will enable it to “achieve better vertical integration and further diversify our product strategy against stronger competition”.

While most competitors offer devices using silicon from suppliers such as Qualcomm or MediaTek, companies including Samsung, Apple and Huawei develop some or all of their own chips in a quest to deliver more integrated products as well as driving their own technology roadmaps.

As with rival products, LG’s Nuclun uses ARM’s big.LITTLE technology, which sees four Cortex A15 1.5GHz cores coupled with four Cortex A7 1.2GHz cores for less intensive tasks.

Nuclun is first being used in LG’s G3 Screen smartphone, which targets the vendor’s home market of South Korea. Designed to support the country’s LTE-Advanced networks, it has a 5.9-inch screen and “inherits the design language, camera and UX features of the popular LG G3”.

LG is clearly looking to echo the strategies of its biggest rivals in the smartphone space, but developing its own application processors is a costly and challenging path to take – and Qualcomm and MediaTek are also rapidly pushing ahead with the evolution of the market to 64-bit chips.

Although Samsung develops its own processors, it also offers a lot of devices powered by third-party vendors, with Qualcomm finding a home among the handset number one’s flagship products.

While LG has announced one device powered by Nuclun, it has not revealed how widely it will be adopted across its portfolio, which is currently dominated by Qualcomm-powered products.

According to reports, LG’s Nuclun is being manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).