Research and development
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 for GSM handsets, but most of its resources in the late 2000s were then focused on the Chinese TD-SCDMA 3G standard. In addition to GSM and combined GSM/TD-SCDMA baseband chipsets, they also supplied chips for two Chinese mobile TV standards: TD-MBMS and CMMB. UNISOC (then known as Spreadtrum)'s customers accounted for 50% of TD-SCDMA handset sales in China Mobile's round of TD-SCDMA trials in 2008.[6]
UNISOC, then still known as Spreadtrum, was formerly a public company listed on NASDAQ, but agreed to an acquisition by Tsinghua Holdings subsidiary Tsinghua Unigroup, in July 2013, for about US$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 a fabless 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 an Intel 5G modem.[10][11] In February 2018, UNISOC introduced high-end smartphone SOCs with augmented reality capabilities.[12]
UNISOC released the 5G 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]
