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.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS