Actions Semiconductor Co. Ltd. is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company founded in 2000 and headquartered in Zhuhai, Guangdong province and has offices in both Shanghai and Shenzhen. The company has about 600 employees and designs SoCs for tablets, digital audio players, photo viewers and related products.

History

In 2008 Actions Semiconductor acquired Hi-Trend Technology Co. Ltd's 2D graphics technology. The company acquired Mavrix technology in 2010. In November 2011, Niccolo Chen stepped down as CEO, and was replaced by Zhenyu Zhou who was Senior Vice President at the time, and was the founder of Mavrix in 2005. On 12 September 2016, Actions Semiconductor announced their merger with Starman Limited, which was completed on 9 December 2016.

Products

The following is a list of system-on-chips developed and marketed by Actions Semiconductor, mainly targeting tablets.

Adoption

S1 MP3 players use chipsets designed by Actions. In 2012, Actions Semiconductor produced the ATM7029 which is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A5-based SoC using Vivante Corporations GC1000 GPU. This SoC has been used in the Ainol NOVO10 Hero II tablet and other low end tablets. For Q2 2014, Actions was reported to be fourth largest supplier of tablet processors to the Chinese market.

Legal cases

At one point, Actions was sued by SigmaTel with SigmaTel prevailing. The findings were that Actions infringed upon SigmaTel by directly copying the ASICs designed by SigmaTel, once a world leader in the MP3 ASIC market. SigmaTel later was sold to Freescale Semiconductor.