The new centre, an extension of the company's existing facility in Noida, near New Delhi, will house approximately 550 engineers, who will be working on embedded software. The company also expects to hire as many as 100 designers for a new design centre in Bangalore.
Geneva-based STMicroelectronics is one of the largest semiconductor companies to develop integrated circuits and software in India. Texas Instruments was the first to open operations in Bangalore, followed by Motorola, Intel, Cadence Design Systems and several others.
The Noida centre is STMicroelectronics' largest design facility outside Europe. The company has purchased 25 acres of land near New Delhi for future expansion. The chipmaker already has approximately 1,400 researchers and chip designers in India.
The company's ST India subsidiary develops applications for set-top boxes, as well as for the wireless, multimedia, imaging and automotive industries. ST India participated in the development of a design for 90-nanometer chip technology. The unit has filed more than 100 patents since it was set up in 1992, with 40 filed in 2003 alone.
"India has all the key ingredients to become a major player in the field of microelectronics, duplicating the success it already achieved in the past few years in the field of" information technology, Carmelo Papa, a corporate vice president at STMicroelectronics, said in a statement.
