Semiconductor and other investments in India

GM taps Indian design prowess

NEW DELHI At 9 p.m. in a General Motors research and development laboratory in Warren, Michigan, Anil Sachdev is watching an electron microscope being focused by remote control. A metallurgist across the world in Bangalore, India, is working while Sachdev prepares to head home.

"We're trying to get more horsepower per liter, better fuel economy from future engines," says Sachdev, GM's manager for light-metals research. The 50 employees in Bangalore already have invented ways to make 2009-model cars more gas-efficient, he says.

India is moving from call centers to innovation. GM, General Electric, Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard are among companies setting up research institutes to utilize the talents of engineers whom they can pay less than $12,000 a year. A grasp of what works in the marketplace may give India an edge over China, its main low-cost competitor for research, says Larry Burns, a General Motors vice president.

"You couple a sense of entrepreneurship with an extremely intelligent, technically capable people who understand markets, and that's what you see happening in India," says Burns, who heads research, development and strategic planning at the world's largest automaker. "India has a leg up on China."

Some of GM's Indian mathematicians are creating virtual models that limit the need to build real auto prototypes, he says. Others are honing supply-chain technology first developed by Indian companies.

"There's a big difference between knowing math and understanding why math models are important to a business," Burns says.
General Electric has centers in both India and China. The difference is that it has 2,200 scientists, researchers and engineers at the Bangalore campus, compared with 1,000 in Shanghai. GE has 22,000 such employees worldwide.

"Any time we invested in the people in India, we made a tremendous amount of money," says Jeffrey Immelt, GE's chief executive.

GE has sunk $80 million into its five-year-old Bangalore center. Its scientists have applied for 260 patents on products such as synthetic materials and ceramics. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has approved 37, according to Purnima Sahni Mohanty, GE's spokeswoman in India.

Infineon to hire 250 pros in India

BANGALORE: Munich-based semiconductor manufacturer Infineon Technologies plans to hire 250 professionals in India in the next 18 months, a senior company executive said.

Infineon currently has an employee base of 550 and proposes to scale it up to 800 in the next one-and-half-years, its senior vice-president and head of the corporate software group, and managing director of Infineon Technologies India Private Limited, S Surya, said.

The company has already invested $150 million in Indian operations, he said.

He said that seventy per cent of the company's employees in the country were from the software side, and the remaining 30 per cent were from hardware.

Cypress Commits $10M to India
A portion of the funds will go toward building an innovation center.

Cypress Semiconductor said on Monday it will develop a $10-million campus in Bangalore, India, to focus on strategic product design.

The announcement came on the company’s 10th anniversary in India. Cypress expects to triple its India workforce, from about 200 to 600 or more by the end of 2007 to support this initiative.

“We’re looking for a two- to three-acre site to build a Cypress campus,” said Paul Keswick, vice president of new product development at Cypress.

According to Mr. Keswick, Cypress’ India design centers will continue supporting all of the company’s business units, including its most important and leading-edge products.

“As we develop new products in such areas as nonvolatile memory and image sensors, these design centers will be a big part of that growth as well,” said Mr. Keswick.

Decade of Development

Cypress opened its first India design center in Bangalore in 1995, specializing in universal serial bus (USB) and static random access memory (SRAM) chips, framers, and clocks.

The Bangalore center’s contributions have included the design of Cypress’s low-speed USB microcontrollers, the 3.3-volt neuron chips for building automation and industrial control networks, and several other developments.

The facility has also played a big role in developing Cypress’s programmable system on a chip (PsoC) mixed signal arrays, according to Mr. Keswick.

Cypress added a second technical center, in Hyderabad, in 2003, which has produced designs for network search engines, 90 nanometer-scale logic devices, and systems engineering.

Cypress’ India design teams have acquired more than 40 U.S. patents and published multiple technical papers during the past 10 years.