MediaTek Inc. is a fabless semiconductor company

Fabless semiconductor company

A fabless semiconductor company specializes in the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing the fabrication or "fab" of the devices to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry...

, designing and selling components for wireless communication, optical storage

Optical storage

Optical storage is a term from engineering referring to the storage of data on an optically readable medium. Data is recorded by making marks in a pattern that can be read back with the aid of light, usually a beam of laser light precisely focused on a spinning disc. An older example, that does...

, GPS, high-definition digital TV and DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

 products. The company was founded on May 28, 1997. It is headquartered in Hsinchu Science Park located in Hsinchu

Hsinchu

Hsinchu City is a city in northern Taiwan. Hsinchu is popularly nicknamed "The Windy City" for its windy climate.Hsinchu City is administered as a special municipality within Taiwan . The city is bordered by Hsinchu County to the north and east, Miaoli County to the south, and the Taiwan Strait...

, Taiwan

Taiwan

Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...

, with sales and research subsidiaries in mainland China

Mainland China

Mainland China, the Chinese mainland or simply the mainland, is a geopolitical term that refers to the area under the jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China . According to the Taipei-based Mainland Affairs Council, the term excludes the PRC Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and...

, Singapore

Singapore

Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...

, India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

, Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

, South Korea

South Korea

The Republic of Korea , , is a sovereign state in East Asia, located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the east, North Korea to the north, and the East China Sea and Republic of China to the south...

, USA

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, Denmark

Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

, and England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. The company is listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange

Taiwan Stock Exchange

The Taiwan Stock Exchange Corporation is a financial institution, located in Taipei 101, in Taipei, Taiwan. The TSEC was established in 1961 and began operating as a stock exchange on 9 February 1962...

.

Overview

MediaTek specializes in system-on-a-chip

System-on-a-chip

A system on a chip or system on chip is an integrated circuit that integrates all components of a computer or other electronic system into a single chip. It may contain digital, analog, mixed-signal, and often radio-frequency functions—all on a single chip substrate...

 solutions for wireless communication, high-definition

High-definition video

High-definition video or HD video refers to any video system of higher resolution than standard-definition video, and most commonly involves display resolutions of 1,280×720 pixels or 1,920×1,080 pixels...

 digital TV

Digital television

Digital television is the transmission of audio and video by digital signals, in contrast to the analog signals used by analog TV...

, optical storage

Optical storage

Optical storage is a term from engineering referring to the storage of data on an optically readable medium. Data is recorded by making marks in a pattern that can be read back with the aid of light, usually a beam of laser light precisely focused on a spinning disc. An older example, that does...

, GPS, and high-resolution DVD player

DVD player

A DVD player is a device that plays discs produced under both the DVD-Video and DVD-Audio technical standards, two different and incompatible standards. These devices were invented in 1997 and continue to thrive...

s. In 2009, the company spent over US$833 million on research and development

Research and development

The phrase research and development , according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, refers to "creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of man, culture and society, and the use of this stock of...

. In early 2008 MediaTek expanded its wireless communications product portfolio by buying the assets of Analog Devices

Analog Devices

Analog Devices, Inc. , known as ADI, is an American multinational semiconductor company specializing in data conversion and signal conditioning technology, headquartered in Norwood, Massachusetts...

' Othello radio transceivers and SoftFone baseband chipsets for about US$350 million. The products go into cell phones and related equipment.

MediaTek stands fourth in the ranking of fabless companies worldwide and stands second of all worldwide semiconductor companies in the field of mobile phone chipsets, after Qualcomm

Qualcomm

Qualcomm is an American global telecommunication corporation that designs, manufactures and markets digital wireless telecommunications products and services based on its code division multiple access technology and other technologies. Headquartered in San Diego, CA, USA...

. MediaTek's products also help Chinese Shanzhai

Shanzhai

Shanzhai refers to Chinese imitation and pirated brands and goods, particularly electronics. Literally "mountain village" or "mountain stronghold", the term refers to the mountain stockades of regional warlords or bandits, far away from official control...

 products to cut cost. MediaTek supplies system software for use with its Shanzhai phone chipsets. It is identified as MAUI and is based on Nucleus RTOS

Nucleus RTOS

Nucleus OS is a real-time operating system and toolset created by the Embedded Systems Division of Mentor Graphics for various central processing unit platforms. Nucleus OS is an embedded software solution and is in an estimated 2.11 billion devices worldwide.Development is typically done on a...

.

According to IC Insights' May 2009 update to the McClean Report, MediaTek has moved into the Top 20 list of semiconductor sales leaders.