MediaTek is quickly establishing itself as one of the most popular chipset vendors but it has only been associated with value-for-money devices. What it’s bringing to CES will help it break away from that image and even jump on the wearables bandwagon.

One of the key components is the MT6290 modem. Built on a 28nm process, the modem supports LTE Cat. 4, meaning it can achieve downlink speeds of up to 150Mbps. This chipset is compatible with MediaTek’s current application processors, so integrating it into new products should be easy.

The MT8135 will also be at the trade show – a big.LITTLE processor with two Cortex-A7s and two Cortex-A15s and a PowerVR Series 6 GPU (same generation as the iPhone 5s GPU). This chipset was announced back in July, so we hope to see actual devices with it at CES. The octa-core MediaTek MT6592 will be at the stands too.

Then there’s the smallest chipset in the world (according to MediaTek), which will be used for wearables (a market set to explode in 2014). Smart TVs, another market gaining popularity, will be catered to by a chipset capable of decoding UHD HEVC-encoded video at 60fps. There will be products for home automation, indoor positioning an Qi wireless charging too.

With demand for NVIDIA Tegra chipsets waning, Samsung’s 5th gen Exynos struggling and TI out of the game, MediaTek has a golden opportunity to become the other big player on the market (other than Qualcomm that is, which is making big promises too).