Cypress plans to invest $2m in its Hyd centre

California-based Cypress Semiconductor Corporation is planning to invest around $2 million to expand its design centre in Hyderabad.

Addressing a press conference here on Thursday, Paul D Keswick, vice-president (new product development and design services) of Cypress, said: "The expansion includes the addition of a silicon validation lab and equipment and engineering talent to support these new functions."

He said that the design centre in Hyderabad, which has primarily designed network search engines (NSEs) over the past year, will now broaden its focus to include next-generation NSEs, 90nm-scale logic devices and systems engineering capabilities.

Cypress currently has 15 design centres across the US, Ireland, Turkey and India. Apart from the design centre in Hyderabad, the company has another design centre in Bangalore. The Bangalore centre specialises in USB chips, SRAMs, framers and clocks.

"We are also planning to increase the headcount to around 50 from the present 17 by 2005, and to 200 by 2007," Keswick said.

"NSEs used in high speed networks is a major growth area for the company and we intend to build on this. The design centre expansion also gives us the opportunity to leverage on the local design talent to support other growing areas of the company," Keswick said.

In addition to the design facilities, Cypress operates two chip fabrication facilities in the US and the Philippines.

Keswick said that the company at the moment was not considering the expansion of the existing FAB facility. "If we would go in for an expansion, it would be decided only during the second half of next year," he said.

For the financial year 2003, the cash balance of the company (including cash, cash equivalents, liquid investments and restricted cash) closed at $380 million. The company expects its revenues to cross the $1-billion mark by the end of 2010.