India’s HCL sets up PowerPC design center

HCL Technologies, one of India’s large outsourcing companies, announced Thursday that it is setting up a center for embedded designs around IBM’s Power processor architecture.

The design center is the first outside IBM, and will have about 25 staff to start with, said Divakar Maddipatla, corporate vice president and head of HCL’s semiconductor practice.

HCL has already done some designs for customers around the Power architecture, but following the agreement with IBM, there will be greater focus in this area, said Maddipatla, who added that HCL and IBM have agreed on a joint go-to-market strategy.

HCL, in Noida, near Delhi, has acquired the right to use and sublicense IBM’s PowerPC 405 and PowerPC 440 embedded microprocessor cores and certain associated peripheral cores, the company said Thursday.

The center will design the Power architecture into applications for networking, wireless, automotive, and consumer markets, which HCL has already been serving, Maddipatla said. HCL will offer the customer a variety of options including chip design and board level design, he said.

HCL has a growing business in VLSI (very large scale integration) and system designs. Some of the designs have also been around the Arm embedded RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) microprocessor core from Arm Holdings in Cambridge, England. If customers require it, HCL will continue to offer designs around the ARM core, after the tie-up with IBM, in Armonk, New York, Maddipatla said.