Cypress turns 10 in India, plans $10 mn investment

The US-based Cypress Semiconductor Corp marked its 10th anniversary in India with the announcement of a $10 million campus in the city for strategic production design. The investment, to be made in two phases, will help triple its India workforce.

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

"We expect our India staff to grow from over 200 employees today to about 500 by the end of 2008," Keswick added. From just 10 people in 1995, the Bangalore design team has grown to 200.

Cypress expects the design centre to play a big role in its growth as the company develops new products in areas like memory and image sensors. The centre has designed, among others, the industry's fastest 16-Mbit asynchronous SRAM; the industry's lowest, high-speed USB controllers and industry's first field programmable speed-spectrum clock generators for electromagnetic interference reduction.

With the "front-to-back" design centre Cypress hopes to strengthen its IT presence in India which Keswick believes needs strengthening.

Cypress' Bangalore centre specialises in USB chips, SRAMs, framers and clocks. It set up its second technical centre in Hyderabad in 2003 which produces designs for network search engines, 90-nm scale logic devices and systems engineering solutions.

Cypress' India design centres have so far secured over 40 US patents.

The company's information technology group (ITG) in India has led several initiatives for critical applications in manufacturing, finance and sales.

Cypress had seen revenues of around $1 billion last fiscal and earned $220 million last quarter and hopes to earn $225-235 million this quarter.