Cypress hiring more engineering staff in India

Cypress Semiconductor announced Monday that it is increasing staff at its two design centers in India from the current 200 engineers to about 500 by the end of 2008. The staff additions will be spread across the company’s design centers in Bangalore and Hyderabad.

A San Jose, California-based semiconductor maker, Cypress is investing $10 million in a new facility in Bangalore that will be able to house about 600 engineers by the end of 2007, Paul Keswick, Cypress’ executive vice president of new product development, engineering and information technology told reporters in Bangalore.

“The speed at which we ramp up will depend on industry growth cycles,” he added.

Cypress’ design center in Bangalore, which currently has close to 200 engineers, is the largest among the company’s 18 design centers worldwide, according to Keswick. Besides doing chip design, the center also develops CAD (computer-aided design) tools, and has a team that handles a part of the company’s information systems requirements, he added. The company also has about 16 engineers at a new development center in Hyderabad that it set up in 2003.

Cypress has about 450 design engineers worldwide. It announced recently that it is setting up a design center in Shanghai, which the company has identified as a potentially large and strategic market. The center will initially focus on semiconductor intellectual property (IP) development primarily for the local market.

“We have about 10 persons at the China center, but we are unlikely to grow the size of that center as fast as the India center,” said Keswick, citing the company’s concerns about IP protection in China as one of the reasons why the company is going slow in that country.

Cypress has however shelved its plans to set up a solar cell manufacturing facility in India. SunPower, a subsidiary of Cypress that specializes in solar cells, has a solar cell facility near Manila in the Philippines. As the company was running out of production capacity at its facility in the Philippines, Cypress considered setting up a joint venture company in India to manufacture the photovoltaic cells.

“We thought of India because we are familiar with the country, and we have a development center in India for the last 10 years,” Keswick said.

However after the proposed joint venture partners backed out, Cypress decided that it would add capacity in the Philippines, rather than set up a new facility, said Keswick, who added that the company would have to take the call again in about six months to nine months, as it anticipates it will run out of capacity again in the Philippines. “At that point we will decide whether we will set up a facility in India or add another facility in the Philippines,” Keswick said.

Cypress’s India design centers specialize in the design of USB (Universal Serial Bus) chips, SRAMs ( static RAM), data framers for networks, network search engines, and clocks.