Infineon Technologies plans to add 200 more employees this year at its research and development (R&D) center in Bangalore, India, taking the total to about 450 workers, according to a company executive.
About 110 of the new staff will be for software development, as the R&D center is emerging as a key center worldwide for the company's embedded software development, said Thomas Simonis, managing director of Infineon Technologies India, the Indian design subsidiary of Infineon, a Munich-based semiconductor maker. The remaining staff additions will be for electronic design automation tool development and chip design.
Although a number of multinational semiconductor companies have design operations in India, they typically started with chip design and then moved to software and application development.
"We do the software that our business groups need to be able to sell their silicon," Simonis said.
In the area of mobile solutions, Infineon India is working on protocol stacks such as GPS (Global Positioning System), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) and UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System).
Besides running an Indian R&D center, Infineon outsources software development to about four Indian companies. In some cases, Infineon also licenses software intellectual property from Indian companies.