MediaTek Is Launching Its 5G Chips In India This Year

On Thursday, MediaTek, the Taiwanese fabless semiconductor firm, announced that by the end of 2019, it will launch a 5G chipset in India to boost its competition in releasing the fifth-generation wireless data connections.

Talking to IANS, MediaTek India Managing Director Anku Jain said that the next-generation network is among the company’s top priorities. He added that the company will certainly release the SoC (system-on-chip) by year-end and it will be ready for shipment in 2020. Currently, MediaTek is spending a lot of time and effort on developing its 5G-enabled chipsets.

Jain said that the company created the M70 modem in 2018 to provide 5G capabilities, which will start shipping later this year with a chipset combining the CPU and the modem into one processor. However, the company didn’t say exactly when it will launch the SoC. In early 2018, the company announced the Helio M70 5G modem at the Guangzhou-based China Mobile Global Partner Conference.

When MediaTek launch its 5G modem, it would stand among the first batch of the industry to offer 5G multi-mode modems integrated with baseband as well as 5Gbps download speeds. The company has three India-based facilities just for Research and Development. Its first R&D center was opened in Noida dated back 2004 while another one was opened in Bengaluru in 2014.

Jain stated that with 5G being the big focus, much of the firm's efforts in R&D will be around 5G development. MediaTek’s India R&D center is its third-biggest across the world, with about 650 headcounts, and the number may rise to over 800 in the near future.

Besides, MediaTek has also partnered with KaiOS Technologies, who makes KaiOS for smart feature phones. With this partnership, MediaTek will get the help it needs to power the 4G and 3G feature phones. During the partnership, the KaiOS would run on the recently announced platform for dual-4G-SIM-card support in cell phones MediaTek MT6731 and the MediaTek 3G MT6572. The first KaiOS-powered MT6731 and MT6572 3G/4G smart feature phones may go on sale in Q2 2019.