PDF: 2962 pages, 5.2 MB - Bay Area Council Economic Institute

Semiconductors
tronics, but its principal investor backed out of the project in January 2008, and the facility will
be used to make solar cells.
Bay Area Connections
One of the first Bay Area firms in Bangalore, Intel Corp., has been in India since 1988.
Through the 1990s, the company had mainly a sales and marketing presence. Then, in
1998-99, it also began some design and IT support work, according to Intel India director
Arjun Batra. “We started in India because this was where you could get the talent relatively
easily; during the Internet bubble days you couldn’t find the people back home,” he says.
Initially there was no concerted corporate strategy in this direction. Intel’s desktop processor
products group first arrived in India in the late 1990s and hired about 20 software engineers to
develop and support 2-D graphic drivers. The numbers slowly grew to several hundred until
2002, when the Intel enterprise processor group started a server processor design project. After
the dot-com bubble burst in the U.S., Intel recognized India’s market and talent potential—a
rapidly growing economy with a low penetration of personal computers and a large, highlyeducated
English-speaking population.
Additionally, many engineers of Indian heritage working in the U.S. were receptive to moving
back to India for high-tech jobs, and that made staffing a design team in India easier. More Intel
groups came, one by one—communications, chip sets, mobile processor and corporate technology—leading
to rapid growth of the Intel India Development Center in Bangalore.
With the ability to ramp up a large team quickly, Batra explains, “it was easier to get approval for
growth in India than in the U.S. The drivers were talent and competitive cost structure, plus increasingly
the customers were expected to be there.” Intel’s India presence grew 40% annually
over 2003-05. From only a few dozen employees in 1999, its workforce numbers 2,700 today. As
it has for many tech firms, India has evolved into a global platform for Intel’s product development
in two principal areas: enterprise (business computers, servers and peripherals) and mobility
(notebooks, wireless communications, graphics).
Product development accounts for 65% of Intel’s India activities. Recently it has begun designing
in India products aimed at developing country markets. Among its projects to date are:
• The Jaagruti (‘awakening’) community computer—hardened to withstand dust, heat, and
humidity, with an auxiliary power source—is distributed to Indian rural villages and set
up in kiosks to be shared.
• The Classmate (formerly EduWise) school laptop, piloted at schools in Tamil Nadu and
elsewhere worldwide, runs Windows as well as Linux, and has WiMax features that enable
students to collaborate on projects and teachers to monitor students’ Internet use
while at school.
• A prototype handheld health monitoring device alerts an at-risk patient and his or her
doctor to a pending medical emergency.
105