LG Electronics is moving to transform itself into a major fabless chipmaker, as the company tries to lessen its dependence upon other chip makers. The South Korean company has hired more than 900 chip designers responsible for making ships for smartphones and Web-connected televisions, LG officials said on Friday, according to the Taipei Times.

LG plans to operate as a fabless chip maker - design the chips and make the farm out the manufacturing to outside fabrication facilities. Taiwan's TSMC will most probably produce the LG-designed chips with using a finer 28-nanometer processing technology.

LG has decided to use LG-branded system chips in its upcoming Web-enabled TVs. LG Electronics' research center has completed the development of the "H13" system chips for use in Web-based TVs. The new chip will be exhibited in January's International Consumer Electronics Show (ICES) in the U.S. desert city of Las Vegas, according to LG's officials.

LG Electronics is also working on a smart phone application processor (AP) before releasing a handset equipped with it next year.

Last has also LG joined Linaro, a "not-for-profit" engineering organization that develops open source Linux software for the ARM architecture. LG and LINARO said they planned to cooperate on new ARM technologies.

So far LG has used APs of various suppliers such as NVIDIA, Texas Instruments and Qualcomm. However, this fragmentation has resulted to delays in the development of new products.