Infineon India to increase staff

Infineon Technologies could hire another 300 software developers in India over the next two years, with the possibility of more hardware design shifting here, S Surya, managing director of the German semiconductor company's Indian subsidiary said.

In that time, software work done in Bangalore will become even more important to Infineon's worldwide strategy.

Some 500 engineers at Infineon Technologies India Private Limited make parts of software that go on chips for use in wireless and wireline communication, automobile electronics and secure cards, says Surya.

About 150 engineers among the 500 also work on building sets of rules for semiconductor chip design, called libraries.

In the next two years, hiring software engineers will be "more in Bangalore" compared with over 10 other centres including at global headquarters in Munich. Infineon has some 4,000 research and development staff worldwide, of which a 1,000 are software developers.

On the hardware design team, "this is their first iteration and they have done well, building the libraries" Surya said.

"As the miniaturisation in chips increases, going from 130 nanometre to 90 to 65 nanometre (a nanometre is a billionth of a metre), the rules of design change and the libraries become more important," he said.

On the software front, work on more components, such as a multimedia reference interface needed for cellular phone handsets, was being shifted to Bangalore from other centres such as Linz in Austria or Trieste in Italy.

More "end to end ownership" of software was coming Bangalore's way rather than making some parts that would work with components made by other centres, he said.