| By the middle of next year, the company is likely to have 2,000 professionals at its Noida centre. |
| "We started with only four individuals in 1989. The growth in the industry has been so stupendous that we have grown into a 1,000 member strong organisation in India. This kind of growth has been made possible because of the excellent skills of our people here. We now plan to get into complex SoCs (system on chip) design for DVDs, navigation systems, imaging devices and set-top boxes," Pradeep Kumar, country director of ST Microelectronics (India), said. |
| "India is close on the heels of becoming a global chip design hub. The industry is growing at a phenomenal rate and companies that have invested in chip design facilities in the country are reaping substantial benefits," Kumar said. |
| The company has increased the capacity at its Noida facility by 550-600 seats to accommodate fresh recruits for its telecom peripheral automation (TPA) division. |
| The division is into design and development of embedded software for telecom companies and hard-disk drive firms. |
| The Noida centre, spread over an area of 1,200,000 square feet with an investment of $20 million, is the company's largest design facility outside Europe. |
| It specialises in system application design; IP/IC design; management information system design and complex system-on-chip design. |
| "Chip design is an extremely specialised field with commensurate manpower requirements. Individuals need to understand the complexities involved in chip designing which could range from speed, size, full system integration within a single chip and low power consumption among others," Praneet Mehrish, country human resource manager of STMicroelectronics India, said. |
| Semiconductor chip design market in India has been estimated to require around 140,000 engineers by 2010. By then, the industry is expected to attain a size of $7 billion. |
Explore Business Standard