Many are surprised when they find out that two out of three smart TVs come with MediaTek SoC inside, but the company is just not advertising this as much as it should. It also became second largest manufacturer of Smartphone SoCs and it successfully launched its 4G line of products.
MediaTek Chairman and CEO Tsai Ming-kai has talked with Nikkei journalists in Japan expressing his interest in IoT market and automotive industry. He picked a rather good place for this announcement, as Japan is a global powerhouse in the automotive industry.
Back in May we saw that Qualcomm has quite a few car designs ready and we learned from company’s executives that they will announce many designs in 2016. This is also the market that MediaTek wants and as many of you already know, Nvidia kind of dominates this market at the moment.
Automotive becomes very interesting when you take in account that there should be autonomous self-driving cars on our streets as early as 2020. These cars need much more silicon than was the case with dumb to semi-smart infotainment systems you get to see in newer cars today. There will be more chips to sell to the car industry and these chips are usually selling at high margin and create some healthy revenue streams.
MediaTek has its LinkIt developer board, centered around the company's Aster chip, the world's smallest commercial SoC. And it has been creating a lot of buzz. This developer/maker board is resulting with some rather interesting IoT products that can be brought to market. The second generation developer’s platform is probably not that far away either.
The IoT market has a lot of potential but it takes time and still lacks killer applications. We are also mindful of the fact that some of these cool things simply cost too much money as connected lights in your house can cost an arm or leg. Philips Hue hub and three bulbs goes for €199 (€169 street price right now ed.) and that is just crazy expensive no matter how cool it is.
Judging by MediaTek's recent conversations with the media, this will soon be a much more competitive, and affordable, market segment.