Vitesse sets up chip design centre

California-based Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation has set up its chip design centre in Hyderabad by entering into an alliance with Adaptec, a software firm. Vitesse had formed an Indian subsidiary about a month back.

While Adaptec is shifting the software development operations from Hyderabad to its brand new facility in Bangalore, Vitesse Semiconductor (India) Private Limited has acquired Adaptec's Hyderabad design division with 25 engineers.

According to Yatin D Mody, CFO of Vitesse, besides hiring Adaptec's engineers, Vitesse will also licence certain technology related to Adaptec's SAS RAID on chip products. The deal involves about $1.4 million.

Vitesse intends to shift its chip design activity from US to India in due course for both economical and human resource considerations, Mody said here today. The company develops and markets a diverse portfolio of high performance, cost competitive semiconductor solutions for communications and storage networks across the globe for its clients such as Alcatel, and Ciena IBM among others.

The company is currently working on advanced RAID on chip, which helps store and recover huge data at high speed. Hyderabad development centre will design and develop integrated circuits and related software targeting the storage and communication markets.