MediaTek

MediaTek was originally a unit of the Taiwanese firm, 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 chips 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 products for mobile devices in 2004 and developed chips such as the MT6225, MT6252, MT6235, and other chips in the MT62xx series, used in mobile phones. Seven years later, it took orders for more than 500 million mobile system-on-chip units per annum, including products for 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.

In September 2019, MediaTek collaborated with VVDN Technologies to design, manufacture new-age AIoT solutions.

On November 25, 2019, MediaTek and Intel announced a partnership to bring 5G to PCs in 2021. MediaTek overtook Qualcomm as the largest vendor of smartphone chipsets in the world in the third quarter of 2020, mainly due to significant growth in the Indian and Latin American markets.

In May 2023, the company announced a new collaboration with Nvidia, using Dimensity to power advanced vehicle infotainment systems for automakers.

Product announcements

The MT8135 system-on-chip (SoC) for tablets announced in July 2013 was the industry's first chip to implement the new ARM big.LITTLE technology for heterogeneous multi-processing. A variant of the MT8135 was used by Amazon in its Kindle Fire HD tablet models. Also on November 20, 2013, MediaTek launched the MT6592 SoC, the first system-on-chip (SoC) with eight CPU cores which could be used simultaneously, in contrast to competing SoCs with eight physical cores of which only a subset could be active at any given time. The "True Octa-Core" trademark was registered to emphasize the difference in marketing materials.

On January 7, 2014, MediaTek announced the development of the world's first "multimode receiver" for wireless charging. In contrast to existing implementations it is compatible with both inductive and resonant charging. The resulting MT3188 wireless charging chip, certified by both the Power Matters Alliance and the Wireless Power Consortium was announced on February 24, 2014.

On February 25, 2014, MediaTek announced the MT6732, and the MT6630. The SoC MT6630 supports 802.11a/b/g/n/ac WiFi, Bluetooth, ANT+, GPS and FM radio.

On May 12, 2015, MediaTek announced its Helio X20, which features the industry's first tri-cluster CPU and the first CPU with a 10-core configuration. It also integrates MediaTek's first modem compatible with CDMA2000. Tri-cluster CPUs were later adopted by HiSilicon (Huawei) in 2018, Qualcomm and Samsung Exynos SoCs in 2019.

In 2005, MediaTek acquired Inprocomm, a wireless semiconductor design company producing 802.11a, b and a/g chips.

On September 10, 2007, MediaTek announced its intention to buy Analog Devices cellular radio and baseband chipset divisions for US$350 million. The acquisition was finalised by January 11, 2008.

On May 5, 2011, MediaTek acquired Ralink Technology Corporation, gaining products and expertise for Wi-Fi technology for mobile and non-mobile applications, as well as for wired DSL and Ethernet connectivity.

On April 11, 2012, MediaTek acquired Coresonic, a global producer of digital signal processing products based in Linköping, Sweden. Coresonic became a wholly owned subsidiary of MediaTek in Europe.

Controversy

Benchmark cheating

On April 8, 2020, AnandTech published an article on MediaTek's Sports Mode; that same day, MediaTek published a post titled "Why MediaTek Stands Behind Our Benchmarking Practices". MediaTek said Sports Mode is designed to show full capabilities during benchmarks, that it is standard practice in the industry, and its device makers can choose to enable it or not. AnandTech pointed out Sports Mode was also being applied to benchmarks intended on measuring user experience benchmarks, providing otherwise untenable results, and that similar high performance modes from other device makers only turn on if chosen by the user, not from automatic app detection from a whitelist. The AnandTech article also noted that they had criticized other vendors such as Samsung Exynos and HiSilicon (Huawei) for past cheating practices.

On April 14, 2020, Qualcomm responded, saying they do not use whitelisting as they consider it cheating. On April 16, 2020, Oppo claimed that it tried to remove Sports Mode, but did not know it was still cached, hence it was removed in a firmware update. UL delisted several MediaTek Helio SoCs from its 3DMark and PCMark rankings.