NEW YORK -- MediaTek is expecting to have its 5G chips running in phones early "in the first half of next year," Finbarr Moynihan, vice president of corporate sales and business development told Light Reading at an event in New York on Tuesday evening.

The firm is expecting to start shipping its 5G system-on-chip (SoC) to customers late this year, meaning the SoC will be commercially available in phones in the first half of next year. The SoC chip is built on a 7-nanometer process and serves sub-6GHz 5G frequencies.

MediaTek is focused on Chinese customers for the initial launch. "It will be China first," Moynihan tells us. Other markets will receive the MediaTek chips later in 2020. Up until now, the majority of 5G handsets have used Qualcomm 5G silicon. This appears set to change in the first half of 2020.

IoT ambitions
Aside from 5G, MediaTek also has growing confidence in its IoT-focused chipsets. The firm was showing off a variety of smart home products from Amazon -- and other vendors -- that use MediaTek silicon.

Figure 1:

Moynihan says that different areas of the IoT market will require different connectivity methods. Smart home devices will depend on WiFi for the time being, the VP expects, whereas lower power connections via cellular IoT will play out in the asset tracking IoT area and more.

— Dan Jones, Mobile Editor, Light Reading