UNISOC announces the world's first 6 nm smartphone SoC with integrated 5G

Mobile chip manufacturer UNISOC (formerly known as Spreadtrum Semiconductor) is a relatively new company that specializes in budget and mid-range smartphone SoCs. Initially, the company used Intel’s foundries, but ever since the ongoing supply problems, UNISOC had to look for other collaborations. The recent deal with TSCM has enabled UNISOC to deliver the world’s first 6 nm EUVL (extreme ultraviolet lithography) mobile SoC with an integrated 5G modem.

The new SoC is called T7520 and it is aimed at mid-range handhelds. It integrates a cluster of four ARM Cortex-A76 cores for high-performance loads plus another ARM Cortex-A55 energy-efficient quad-core cluster for simple tasks. For the graphics component, UNISOC’s T7520 includes an ARM Mali-G75 GPU that can handle multiple 4K displays with HDR10+ and 120 Hz refresh rates. Of course, AI acceleration has not been forgotten, as the new SoC comes with an advanced NPU that is 50% faster than the previous version. There also is support for multi-camera setups with 100 MP image sensors, while security features are facilitated through a Secure Element processor. Other unofficial features include: LPDDR4x RAM support, UFS 2.1 / eMMC 5.1 storage formats, WiFi 6,Bluetooth 5.0.

UNISOC developed the integrated 5G modem in-house and the company claims that this is the world’s first modem to support dual-5G NR TDD+FDD carrier aggregation with a peak uplink speed of more than 3.25 Gbps. Through the reduced production costs enabled via the new 6 nm manufacturing process, UNISOC seeks to help lower the cost of 5G-enabled mid-range handhelds.

Among the first handhelds to come powered by this new SoC is the Hisense F50 5G model, but there is no official launch date for now.