Within 15 months of starting up, Spreadtrum had designed its first full family of phone chips. The Shanghai company made baseband processors, the part of a handset that encodes and decodes every call and runs the phone's software. It packed in music, video and TV-out features at a low price. It also backed TD-SCDMA, China's own 3G standard. When it filed to list on Nasdaq in 2007, it was a chip designer barely six years old.

Fabless in Shanghai

Ping Wu, Datong Chen and Renyong Fan were among the founders who started Spreadtrum in April 2001. The company was fabless: it designed chips and paid others to make them. It began earning revenue in 2003. Its chips supported GSM and GPRS phones, and its open platform let handset makers add their own features quickly. Wu served as president, chief executive and chairman from the start.

Fourteen Dollars an ADS

Spreadtrum priced its IPO at $14 per American depositary share in June 2007 and listed on Nasdaq as SPRD. The stock struggled at first, then recovered as its chips won orders for low-cost smartphones. In 2013 Tsinghua Unigroup, a state-backed Chinese tech group, bought Spreadtrum for about $1.78 billion. The company left Nasdaq that December. Its business later became part of UNISOC.

Cover: Folded Surimono with Kite, Nakajima Raishô. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a kite on the wind (wireless signals).