Spreadtrum enters the market with "low-end" products and competes head-on with HiSilicon Ruixin and Microlink

Latest update time：2015-04-10

Reads：

Click on the blue font " Semiconductor Industry Observation " under the title to follow ICBank

Recommended : Semiconductor circle WeChat platform icquan (welcome to follow)

On April 2, Spreadtrum Communications released two quad-core SoC platforms using 28nm technology in Shenzhen: the SC9830A supporting five-mode LTE and the SC7731G supporting WCDMA. Spreadtrum officials revealed that the two chips have been put into commercial use and will be put into mass production this year.

At the end of March, Redmi 2A was released, using Leadcore LC1860, and the price of smartphones was reduced to 499 yuan (promotional price) and 599 yuan. Now Spreadtrum is disrupting the market again, and Spreadtrum is also planning to produce an octa-core chip product based on ARMCortex-A53. The smartphone chip market is in turmoil again.

Opportunities in the low-end market

In the smartphone chip market, Qualcomm and MediaTek originally dominated the market, with other manufacturers having a small share. The low-end products of these two companies basically evolved according to the evolution of the ARM public version.

In 2013, MT6589 became very popular, and Qualcomm followed suit, abandoning the weak ARM A5 core and adopting the A7 core to launch products. At the end of 2014, ARM's 64-bit A53 core with better performance and lower power consumption appeared, and Qualcomm and MediaTek continued to follow up and dominated the thousand-yuan mobile phone market.

In fact, the hardware of smartphones has begun to be in excess, and the gap between low-end and high-end products is narrowing. The seemingly old ARM A7 core is still valuable. As long as the system is properly optimized, smartphones with the A7 core can still maintain smooth operation.

Seeing this opportunity, Xiaomi invested in Unigroup at the end of 2014, obtained the 1860 license, and launched Redmi 2A.

It is precisely this market that Spreadtrum is disrupting. The SC9830A released by Spreadtrum this time has a built-in quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 application processor with a main frequency of up to 1.5GHz, supports 4G five-mode, supports dual-SIM dual-standby function, integrates dual-core ARM Mail 400MP, NEON multimedia processor, supports 1080P high-definition video and a 13-megapixel camera.

The specifications are almost the same as those of Unigroup's LC1860, and in terms of price, Spreadtrum said it can reduce the price of the whole machine to 400 yuan, which is even lower than Redmi 2A.

Currently, the price of low-end mobile phones with Qualcomm and MediaTek chips is still around 1,000 yuan. If mobile phones with similar experience are reduced to 400 yuan, it will undoubtedly be a huge blow. On the day when Spreadtrum released its new product, MediaTek's stock price fell by 5 yuan.

China's power in the chip market

In the mobile phone market, the earliest chip giants were TI and Infineon. Later, MediaTek and Spreadtrum emerged and took away part of the low-end market share.

In the era of smartphones, Qualcomm emerged as a giant. After several years of painful struggle, MediaTek got back on track and competed with Qualcomm.

In the past two years, chip manufacturers in mainland China have started to make efforts. After several years of ridicule, Huawei HiSilicon successfully completed the integration of baseband processor and application processor, and launched Huawei Kirin 910, 920, 925, 928, and 930. Kirin 928 has reached the top level in performance.

In the low-end market, Leadchip and Rockchip win by offering low prices, with products that have average performance but great cost performance. Now Spreadtrum, which has merged with RDA, has made a renewed effort and joined the battle, and the share of Chinese manufacturers is increasing.

The future smartphone chip market

Over the past 30 years, Made in China has expanded from textiles to shoes, hats, toys, bedding, electromechanical products, and then to PCs and smartphones. As long as there are no patent barriers or trade barriers, the low-end market will always be occupied by Made in China. Today, this trend also exists in the smartphone chip market. Because of ARM public version authorization, Chinese companies can produce high, medium and low performance chips as long as they obtain authorization, and the processor is a foundry. Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek, HiSilicon, and Rockchip are all produced by TSMC, and the technical barriers are invisible.

The advantage of Chinese chip manufacturers is that their local industry chain for smartphone production is already there, making development cooperation very convenient.

Therefore, Xiaomi 2A replaced Qualcomm and MediaTek with Unichip, and Spreadtrum is said to have obtained orders from Coolpad and Lenovo. China's local low-end chips are replacing Qualcomm and MediaTek to dominate the low-end market.

According to the rules of other industries, the future smartphone chip market will be dominated by Apple and Qualcomm at the high end, and HiSilicon, Spreadtrum, Rockchip, and Unichip at the low end. MediaTek is caught in an awkward situation. Today's HTC may be the template for MediaTek in the future.

From: Zhuji.com