Motorola opens maiden R&D lab

Motorola Inc has opened an applied research lab in Bangalore, the semiconductor devices maker's first in India and 11th worldwide. The lab will research areas that "will not necessarily impact short-term business but play an important role in developing technologies in which the company has long-term interests," Padmasree Warrior, executive vice-president told reporters here on Thursday.

Warrior, also the chief technology officer of the company, heads the Motorola Labs effort, its global software group, and emerging early stage businesses, a company release said.

The new lab will "augment" Motorola's existing India R&D centres, at Bangalore and Delhi, which account for 1,700 of the firm's 4,600 "technologists" on Warrior's worldwide team.

Worldwide, Motorola spent some $3.5 billion last year on R&D, Warrior said. The company also has some 60 design centres, from Paris to Shanghai.

Motorola's Worldwide staff of over 65,000 could be located up to 40 per cent outside the US, Sana estimates. The company has some 20,000 engineers. R&D spending in India will increase between 10 per cent and 20 per cent every year "as long as India continues to grow," Warrior said.

The applied research lab will work on converged networks, autonomic networking, enterprise applications, embedded systems and physical sciences.

"This supports Motorola's vision of seamless mobility: easy, uninterrupted access to information, entertainment, communication, monitoring and control," the release said.

Through its 80 per cent subsidiary, Freescale Semiconductors, the company has another 300 engineers working on "hi-end semiconductor design", in Delhi, said Amit Sharma, a vice president.

On the applied research lab, co-location with Motorola product engineering, in Bangalore, ensures strong technology transfer to Motorola's networks, global software and mobile devices groups, Sharma said.

India will also be "used as a test bed" for several technologies, including in the mobile telephony area, being developed by the company for emerging markets. "By mid 2006 we should be releasing products based on these technologies," he said.

The company, from 1991 when it first started an R&D centre in India, has invested some $150 million in its Indian operations to date. This includes the new lab and another facility in Hyderabad, which is "being set up," Soumitra Sana managing director of Motorola India Electronics Private, a subsidiary, said.