MediaTek Inc

MediaTek Inc.  is a Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company that provides system-on-chip solutions for wireless communications, HDTV, DVD and Blu-ray. Headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan, the company has 25 offices worldwide and was the 3rd largest fabless IC designer worldwide in 2016. Since its founding in 1997, MediaTek has been creating chipset solutions for the global market. MediaTek also provides its customers with reference designs.

MediaTek was originally a unit of United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) tasked with designing chipsets for home entertainment products. 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.

The company started out designing chipsets for optical drives and subsequently expanded into chip solutions for DVD players, digital TVs, mobile phones, smartphones and tablets. In general MediaTek has had a strong record of gaining market share and displacing competitors after entering new markets.

The company launched a division to design solutions for mobile devices in 2004. 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. By providing extensive system engineering assistance the company allowed many smaller companies and new entrants to enter a mobile phone market that had previously been dominated by large, often vertically integrated corporations that had long been broadly entrenched in the telecommunications industry. The mobile chip market quickly became the main growth driver for the company.

At Mobile World Congress 2014, MediaTek unveiled its new brand “Everyday Genius”, dubbing the term “Super-mid market”, with the vision and aiming to make smartphones more accessible affordable to the wider market.

As of November 2014, over 1500 mobile models accounting for 700 million units were shipped globally in 2014, using MediaTek chips, and the company posted revenues of US$5.3 billion in the first half of 2014, nearly as much as the whole of 2013. The revenue growth was however partly due to revenue recognition from the acquisition of MStar which became effective at the beginning of 2014

"True Octa-core" trademark

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". On November 20, 2013, in a press event held in Beijing MediaTek officially announced the MT6592 SoC. It's a 'true octa core' chip with eight ARM Cortex-A7 application processor clocked up to 1.7–2.0 GHz and Mali-450 MP4 GPU clocked at 700 MHz. There is no on-board LTE modem but it includes NFC radio. It also supports UltraHD or 4K video playback.

MediaTek has subsequently introduced additional products using a "true octa-core" CPU configuration using Cortex-A53 cores, with support for ARM's 64-bit ARMv8-Aarchitecture, including the MT6752 clocked at 1.7 GHz and the high-end MT6795 clocked up to 2.2 GHz. Devices using the MT6795 were expected to be commercially available by the end of 2014

Markets[

MediaTek's revenue product mix in 2014, consisted of approximately 50–55% smartphone chip solutions, 25–30% digital home solutions (which includes DTV chips), 5–10% tablet chip solutions, 5–10% feature phone chip solutions and 5–10% Wi-Fi solutions.

According to information provided in MediaTek's Q1 2014 financial results conference call, in terms of product mix, MediaTek's smartphone chipset shipments consisted of 5-10% single-core, 45-55% dual-core, 30-35% quad-core and 5-10% octa-core. Most octa-cores were sold in China, while the export market (chips sold directly to manufacturers in countries such as India) was dominated by dual-core. In terms of baseband technology (smartphones only), WCDMA was 50-55%, TD 25-30% and EDGE 10-15%.According to MediaTek's Q3 2014 conference call, dual-core shipments for entry-level devices continued to be important in the second half of 2014 with an increase in export shipments as MediaTek's competitiveness China was affected by the transition to 4G.

MediaTek started shipping SoC solutions with integrated 4G LTE baseband in volume in the second half of 2014, which was later than Qualcomm, which had been shipping SoCs with integrated 4G for some time,which was likely to impact MediaTek as Chinese telecom providers such as China Mobile and carriers in other countries push and subsidize LTE technology. Although MediaTek's MT6290 stand-alone 4G baseband combined with its MT6582 or MT6592 SoCs is less profitable for MediaTek than a single-chip 4G solution would be, as of mid-2014 they have been adopted in some models by large manufacturers. However, the first generation of new affordable 4G smartphone models from large MediaTek clients such as Alcatel One Touch and ZTE use Qualcomm's Snapdragon 400 and 410 platforms with integrated 4G baseband. MediaTek has indicated that chips with 4G were expected to make up 20% of shipments in Q4 2014, with a significant increase expected for 2015, which will also see improvements to its product mix as new 4G chips allow it to target higher market segments