We will see them in 2019 as Mediatek tries to steal a march in the 5G market.

MediaTek's planned volume production and official shipment for its new generation modem chips will come at least six months ahead of its original schedule, demonstrating the chip designer's determination to speed up its deployments in 5G communication technologies. This also indicates that the business opportunities for 5G applications are beginning to ferment, industry sources said.

MediaTek CEO Rick Tsai said that his company's R&D teams are actively working to create for consumers the best "user experiences" associated with 5G and AI. He stressed that by leveraging its broad range of excellent IPs and chipset solutions, MediaTek can help ecosystems and customers roll out the best-performance terminal devices to jointly embrace bright business prospects in the 5G era.

The firm's president Joe Chen said that MediaTek has done a good job in accelerating the popularity of smartphones with consumers worldwide, as it has always developed new solutions from the perspectives of consumers while maintaining close cooperation with smartphone vendors and telecom operators by providing its broad 4G application technologies.

MediaTek will not only seek to hit the 5G chip market with a bang in 2019, but will also significantly ramp up its shipments in 2020-2022 to build a solid presence in the market, Chen said.