Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturer MediaTek will start mass production of its first 5G mobile chip from December, which will be used by global handset makers, the company said Tuesday.

The 5G chip, named Dimensity 1000, is scheduled to be supplied to major smartphone vendors from the Chinese mainland in the first half of 2020, and to non-Chinese handset brands in the second half, the company told reporters at a launch event held in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

The Dimensity 1000 chip is able to help smartphones accelerate AI processing and computing speeds, and improves a phone’s energy efficiency relative to its size. It is able to do this because all of its components are integrated inside one tiny chip, thus leaving more space for bigger batteries or larger camera sensors to be installed.

The release of the Dimensity 1000 chip enables MediaTek to rival Huawei, Samsung, and Qualcomm which have all already released 5G mobile chips.

MediaTek is one of the world’s ten biggest 5G patent owners, the company said.

In the first ten months of 2019, China shipped 3.28 million 5G smartphones, representing 1% of the country’s overall handset market, according to a report by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.

Contact reporter Ding Yi (yiding@caixin.com)

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