Silicon Laboratories opens new unit in Hyderabad, plans to triple workforce

Fabless semiconductor manufacturer Silicon Laboratories on Wednesday opened a new Research & Development (R&D) unit in Hyderabad, with plans to triple its headcount in India over the next few years.

The new facility would be the largest global centre for Silicon Lab’s engineering and wireless connectivity innovations. It would help the company scale its IoT wireless products and solutions offering industrial, commercial, and home and life applications.

The firm, with annual revenue of $886.7 million, designs and develops mixed-signal integrated circuits, microcontrollers, and sensors for the Internet of Things (IoT), and wireless connectivity devices such as Wi-fi, Bluetooth, and Z-Wave.

Matt Johnson, President and CEO of Silicon Labs, said, “Our vision for the new facility is to make it premier in IoT wireless centres in the region. It is also a centre of excellence (CoE) for Wifi, which is one of the key components of our growth. So it has an integral and elemental role in our future growth as a company.”

Johnson said the company plans to triple its headcount at the Hyderabad facility to 1,500 employees over the next few years. “We see India and Hyderabad particularly ultra-competitive and incredibly attractive. This is why it’s our fastest growing site and largest R&D centre.”

Silicon Labs is headquartered in Austin, Texas with 20 offices worldwide. The company first entered Hyderabad in 2020 with an acquisition of a startup. Johnson said, “India presents a truly unique combination of talent and scalability. We need to capture that opportunity to scale. There is no other place where we can have access to that talent pool and maximize the opportunity that we really believe is once in a lifetime.” 

He added that though the availability of talent was strong in India, it requires better collaboration with universities and the government. “It is really important to have university relationships, the industry, and government collaboration,” he said. 

The new facility is located at the Salarpuria Sattva Knowledge City of Hyderabad and adds up to 100,000 square feet of office space.

Manish Kothari, Senior Vice President, Silicon Labs India, said “Our Hyderabad location will be a centre of excellence for integrated hardware and software platforms, user-friendly development tools, and an unsurpassed ecosystem of new wireless technologies. We will connect with the local community and open doors for the city's competitive talent pool.”

Kothari said the new telecom bill may help the company expand its unlicensed spectrum vertical in India. “We have the broadest and the deepest wireless protocol offerings in the unlicensed spectrum. As the government harmonizes the policy and makes it uniform across the spectrum availability in line with global standards, it would enable us to make products that can scale instead of making it custom for India.”