MediaTek is expected to ramp up investments to develop peripheral chips to enrich smartphones such as wireless charging, NFC, and fingerprint recognition which in return will jack up the price/performance ratio for smartphones, according to industry sources.

　　While the competition in the handset solution market is expected to be as fierce as usual in 2014, new solutions coming out in the second half of the year or the first half of 2015 are likely to be similar as most chipset vendors are now eager to roll out chips with a higher number of cores or supporting 4G and 64-bit computing, said the sources.

　　The use of core CPUs will then not be sufficient enough for smartphone vendors to win market share. Instead, smartphone models incorporated with more peripheral chips that enrich applications will have more chances to strive in the market, the sources commented.

　　MediaTek has teamed up with over 10 IC design houses to jointly develop related wireless charging technologies and solutions, noted the sources.

　　Among those IC design houses, On-Bright Electronics, Leadtrend Technology and iWatt (a unit of Dialog Semiconductor) have already had their rapid charge controller ICs verified for MediaTek's chipset platform, revealed the sources.