Allwinner

Allwinner Technology Co., Ltd. is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company that designs ARM-based system-on-chip (SoC) products for consumer electronics. Headquartered in Zhuhai, Guangdong, the company markets SoCs intended for tablets, digital media players, set-top boxes, cameras, and other embedded devices.

Founded in 2007, Allwinner rose to prominence as a low-cost SoC supplier, with processors widely used in inexpensive Android tablets and a range of embedded products. Through the 2010s, the company built a broad ecosystem of reference designs and development platforms to support its devices and partners.

Allwinner’s product lines are grouped into series such as the A-series application processors (general-purpose CPUs with multimedia capabilities), the H-series multimedia-oriented processors, and the V-series video processing chips. In the 2020s the company introduced a D1 line based on the RISC-V architecture for edge compute and embedded use. Allwinner SoCs integrate CPUs, GPUs, multimedia accelerators, memory controllers, and peripherals on a single die and are designed to support Linux and Android environments.

Industry status and software: Allwinner operates as a fabless company, outsourcing fabrication to semiconductor foundries. The chips achieved wide use in budget devices, but have historically drawn attention for variable levels of open-source driver support. Linux kernel mainline support has improved over time as community and vendor contributions have expanded driver and documentation availability. Allwinner continues to compete in low-cost SoC markets and collaborates with hardware partners on reference designs and development platforms.