Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. (Chinese: 展讯通信有限公司; pinyin: Zhǎnxùn Tōngxìn Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī), now Unisoc, is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Shanghai which produces chipsets for mobile phones. It is the world's 17th-largest fabless semiconductor company measured by 2011 revenues.
Spreadtrum has research centres in Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Xiamen, US, Finland and India, technical support centre in Shenzhen, and international field support offices in South Korea, Taiwan and Mexico. Its products support a broad range of wireless communications standards, including GSM, GPRS, EDGE, TD-SCDMA, W-CDMA, HSPA+ and TD-LTE.
The company originally produced chips for GSM handsets, but most of its resources are now focused on the Chinese TD-SCDMA 3G standard. In addition to GSM and combined GSM/TD-SCDMA baseband chipsets, Spreadtrum also supplies chips for two Chinese mobile TV standards: TD-MBMS and CMMB. Spreadtrum's customers accounted for 50% of TD-SCDMA handset sales in China Mobile's current round of TD-SCDMA trials.
Spreadtrum was formerly a public company listed on NASDAQ, but agreed to an acquisition by Tsinghua Unigroup in July 2013 for about $1.78 billion; the deal completed on 23 December 2013.
In 2014, Tsinghua Unigroup acquired RDA Microelectronics for US$907 Million. RDA Microelectronics was a fabless semiconductor company that designs, develops and markets wireless system-on-chip and radio-frequency semiconductors for cellular, connectivity and broadcast applications.
In 2018, the company was renamed Unisoc. Also in 2018, the company began working on a 5G smartphone platform with an Intel 5G modem. In February 2018, Spreadtrum was introducing high-end smartphones with Augmented Reality.
