MediaTek Inc. is a fablesssemiconductor company that provides system-on-chip solutions for smartphones, tablets, optical drives, digital televisions, set-top boxes, GPS units, Wi-Fi routers and Bluetooth devices. Headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan, the company has 25 offices worldwide and is one of the top 25 semiconductor suppliers globally by sales volume.[4][5]
Since its founding in 1997, MediaTek has democratized the global market for smartphones, among other products, through the creation of turnkey chipset solutions.[6][7][3] The solutions comprise comprehensive software and hardware components designed to enable equipment makers to focus less on engineering and more on establishing brand identity and recognition.[8] MediaTek also provides its customers with reference designs and directions on how to implement its solutions.[9]
MediaTek was originally a unit of United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) tasked with designing chipsets for home entertainment products.[6] On May 28, 1997, the unit was spun off and incorporated. MediaTek Inc. was listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSEC) under the "2454" code on July 23, 2001.[10]
During its early years, the company primarily designed chipsets for optical drives and digital TVs.[6] By early 2000, MediaTek was among the world's largest suppliers in both product categories.[6] In 2004, the company launched a new division to design solutions for mobile devices. Seven years later, it was taking orders for more than 500 million mobile system-on-chip units per annum, which included solutions for both feature phones and smart devices.[6]
On April 11, 2012, MediaTek acquired Coresonic, a global market leader in the field of digital signal processing, based in Linköping, Sweden. Coresonic is now a wholly owned subsidiary of MediaTek in Europe.[12]
MStar
On June 22, MediaTek announced that it would acquire rival chip designer MStar. The initial phase of the deal will see MediaTek taking a 48 percent stake, with an option to purchase the remaining stake at a later date.[13]
In 2009, the company spent over US$833 million on research and development.[14] In early 2008 MediaTek expanded its wireless communications product portfolio by buying the assets of Analog Devices' Othello radio transceivers and SoftFone baseband chipsets for about US$350 million. The products go into cell phones and related equipment.
MediaTek's Chipsets supports the Android OS with Smartphone chipsets such as the MT6575 which is a 1 GHz single-core ARM Cortex-A9 based SoC featuring an HSPA modem,[15] which was followed by the launch of the MT6577 which is a 1 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 based SoC.[16]
Breakthroughs
Heterogeneous multi-processing
With the release of its MT8135 system-on-chip (SoC) for tablets in July, 2013, MediaTek became the world’s first company to commercially supply ARM big.LITTLE™ chipset heterogeneous multi-processing capabilities.[17][18] By concurrently allocating tasks to individual CPU cores, the MT8135 offered significant power saving advantages over competing mobile device solutions at the time.[17]
True Octa-Core
In July, 2013, MediaTek became the first system-on-chip (SoC) supplier to announce the development of an octa-core mobile device SoC capable of processing tasks with eight CPU cores concurrently, a solution the company refers to as "True Octa-Core".[19]
Product categories
MediaTek delivers solutions across the IT, consumer electronics and mobile communications fields. Its chipsets are divided into the following product categories[20]:
US$3.36 billion (2012)[3]
