 | |
Native name | 紫光展锐 |
|---|---|
| Industry | Semiconductors |
| Predecessor | Spreadtrum |
| Founded | April 2001; 23 years ago (2001-04) |
| Headquarters | Shanghai, China |
Key people | Ma Daojie (chairman) Ren Qiwei (CEO) |
| Products | Central processing units Chipsets Microprocessors Systems-on-chip (SoCs) |
Number of employees | 5,500+[1] |
| Parent | Tsinghua Unigroup |
| Website | www |
UNISOC (Chinese:紫光展锐;pinyin:Zǐguāng zhǎn ruì), formerlySpreadtrum Communications, Inc. (Chinese:展讯通信有限公司;pinyin:Zhǎnxùn Tōngxìn Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī), is a Chinesefabless semiconductor company headquartered inShanghai which produces chipsets formobile phones. UNISOC develops its business in two major fields - consumer electronics and industrial electronics. Consumer electronics includes smartphones, feature phones, smart audio systems, smart wearables and other related devices. Industrial electronics cover fields such as LAN IoT, WAN IoT and smart displays.[1]
From 2021, it has been the fourth largest mobile processor manufacturer in the world, afterMediaTek,Qualcomm andApple, with 9% of global market share.[2]
In 2021,Tsinghua Unigroup, UNISOC's former parent company, was on the verge of bankruptcy. After a year-long restructuring, a private equity consortium headed by Chinese government-backed Wise Road Capital took over in 2022 and now controls the company.[3][4] In addition to Wise Road, the company's shareholders include theChina Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, a Chinese government-backed investment fund for chips, which has a 13% stake in the company.[5]
UNISOC products support a broad range of wireless communications standards, including GSM, GPRS, EDGE, TD-SCDMA, W-CDMA, HSPA+ and TD-LTE. UNISOC has a global R & D layout, with more than 5,000 employees worldwide, 90% of whom are R&D personnel.
The company originally produced chips forGSM handsets, but most of its resources in the late 2000s were then focused on the ChineseTD-SCDMA3G standard. In addition to GSM and combined GSM/TD-SCDMA baseband chipsets, they also supplied chips for two Chinese mobile TV standards: TD-MBMS andCMMB. UNISOC (then known as Spreadtrum)'s customers accounted for 50% of TD-SCDMA handset sales inChina Mobile's round of TD-SCDMA trials in 2008.[6]
UNISOC, then still known as Spreadtrum, was formerly a public company listed onNASDAQ, but agreed to an acquisition by Tsinghua Holdings subsidiaryTsinghua Unigroup, in July 2013, for aboutUS$1.78 billion;[7] the deal completed on 23 December 2013.[8]
In 2014, Tsinghua Unigroup acquired RDA Microelectronics for US$907 Million.[9] RDA Microelectronics was afabless semiconductor company that designed, developed and marketed wireless system-on-chip and radio-frequency semiconductors for cellular, connectivity and broadcast applications.
In 2018, the company Spreadtrum Communications and RDA Microelectronics was merged and rebranded to UNISOC, in which Intel agreed to invest $1.5 billion for a 20 percent stake. The company also began working on a 5G smartphone platform with anIntel 5G modem.[10][11] In February 2018, UNISOC introduced high-end smartphone SOCs withaugmented reality capabilities.[12]
UNISOC released the5G technology platform Makalu 1.0 and the V510 5G baseband chip in February 2019. A year later, they launched the UNISOC T7520, a 5G SoC that uses of 6nm EUV advanced process technology.[13]
In 2021, it beat HiSilicon and ranked third in the Chinese smartphone AP market share.[14]
Currently, UNISOC's main products include mobile system-on-chips, baseband chips, AI chips, radio frequency chips, and other communication, computing, and control chips, which are widely used in consumer electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets, and smart wearables.
