MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it is testing its 5G chips that support millimeter-wave technology at the company’s research-and-development (R&D) center in Hsinchu in collaboration with Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) to accelerate the rollout of the world’s first chips using the technology.
MediaTek’s announcement came after the world’s largest 5G handset chip supplier built a strong presence in 5G chips using other technologies, driven by chips that support the 6 gigahertz band or lower.
The partnership with Chunghwa Telecom offers favorable conditions for MediaTek to introduce the new 5G chips to the US, Europe and Japan, the companies said in a joint statement.
Photo: Grace Hung, Taipei Times
MediaTek has cooperated with more than 100 telecoms worldwide to certify its 5G chips, it said.
To create the environment needed for testing, Chunghwa Telecom has deployed 5G non-stand-alone mobile networks in MediaTek’s 5G R&D center, utilizing the telecom’s mid-band 3.5 gigahertz and high-band 28 gigahertz bands, the statement said.
MediaTek told investors in January that its millimeter-wave system-on-a-chip has been certified by a major global operator, with mass production scheduled to begin in the second half of this year for the global market.
MediaTek said it expects the worldwide 5G penetration rate to surpass 50 percent this year, compared with slightly more than 35 percent last year.
That means about 700 million 5G smartphones would be shipped this year, up 40 percent from 500 million units last year, the company said.
Separately, MediaTek said it has won priority status to acquire the superficies rights for a 1,736m2 plot in Hsinchu for NT$3.77 billion (US$130.78 million), the company said in a Taiwan Stock Exchange filing yesterday.
The land is owned by the Railway Bureau, it said.
MediaTek was given the right to develop the land near Hsinchu’s high-speed rail station for 70 years, the bureau said in a statement.
The chipmaker plans to spend NT$9 billion on the development project and create 3,000 new jobs, the bureau said.
In a separate statement, MediaTek said it is planning to build an office building at the same site, as that would boost talent acquisition of R&D engineers to support the company’s bullish prospects.
MediaTek plans to hire 2,000 new employees this year, the company said.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS