The Hindu Business Line : AMD sets up engg centre in Bangalore

CHIPMAKER AMD is setting up an engineering centre in Bangalore to design its next generation microprocessors. The company is investing $5 million in the India Engineering Centre (IEC) and plans to hire about 120 engineers by 2005-end, said Mr Ajay Marathe, Corporate Vice-President, AMD.

The AMD India Engineering Centre Pvt Ltd would be the wholly-owned subsidiary of AMD. It will initially hire about 50 engineers this year.

Announcing the company's India plans, Mr Marathe said the engineering centre in Bangalore would initially collaborate with US teams in the implementation of next generation processor products. Subsequently, the IEC would achieve an independent product team status over the next three years. AMD chose Bangalore to house its engineering centre as the city has the largest talent pool for VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) development, said Mr Gopala Krishna, General Manager, AMD IEC. AMD designs and produces microprocessors, flash memory devices and low-power processor solutions for the computer, communications and consumer electronics industries.

"Engineers at the India design centre will work closely with AMD's engineering teams in the US and will help define future microprocessor designs focused on meeting the evolving user needs in India and other high-growth markets," said Mr Randy Allen, AMD Computation Products Group Vice-President of Engineering. The Computation Products Group has engineering teams in three other locations at Sunnyvale, Austin and Boston. "We are expanding engineering operations at all our design locations," he added.