#mobile SoC

At the height of war, there were Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipsets, engaged in heated battle against Apple’s A-series mobile chips. But behind the scenes, a few key players had controlled the chips for “all the other” mobile devices; the affordable phones, non-flagships, entry-level, billions of users - with UNISOC being an integral competitor. The Early Days Unisoc actually started as Spreadtrum Electronics, a small company built by Chinese entrepreneurs freshly returned from Silicon Valley. They succeeded at this and quickly became the go-to of the country’s largest telecom provider, China Mobile. Their growth continued when they set up a one-stop-shop for all mobile device internals at a time when manufacturers had to source the CPU, modem, and GPS chips separately. The brand’s largest success Spreadtrum and RDA finally merged in 2018 under a new name: UNISOC, meaning UNIFIED Systems on Chips (SOC). The first chip launched under the UNISOC flag was the SC9863 (2018), embedded in devices like the Alcatel 1S (2019). Despite its shortcomings, that chip proved to be a good sign of things to come - as it was followed by the revolutionary UNISOC Tiger T618. Read more in our articles including "Rise of the Dragon: The UNISOC Story" and "Results: Mobile 3G Usage".