Philips will take up hardware development

Philips Semiconductor, the Euros 4.9 billion arm of Philips, has outlined its plans to set up a hardware development group in India. Philips Semiconductor already has a design competence centre as part of Philips Software in India.

The addition of the hardware design group will see the headcount of the group double to 800 over the next 2-3 years.

Announcing the plans, Rene Penning de Vries, Philips Semiconductors chief technology officer and senior vice-president said: "Our software design team has been building competencies in the core areas of Systems-On-Chip design, embedded software development, reusable software and hardware and design technology. This is one part of the service we offer to original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and we need to graduate to offer the next level of service "" which is the total system solutions. It is in this direction that we are setting up the hardware design unit in Bangalore."

Elaborating on the result areas of the new division, Penning de Vries said: "The consumer electronics industry wants vendors like us to deliver complete packages so that they can concentrate more on business development activities. The hardware design unit will work on designing compatible packages for the kind of solutions we offer on our platforms. We will also focus on IP creation and system integration as part of the unit."

Philips Semiconductor design team in Bangalore provides architectural, design and development services spanning the domains of mobile computing, digital consumer and connectivity.

Adding that India's focus on software programming will shift to more high-end work, Penning de Vries said: "There is a huge number of Indians returning from the Silicon Valley or Europe bringing back with them knowledge of high-end technology and the young and talented here are exploring new opportunities in high-end technology. This will invariably lead to move to hardware, software and system-level development with emphasis on contribution to IP creation efforts. It is this boom we will ride on."