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

Semiconductors
Intel’s India experience has not been without challenges. Sophisticated hardware and product
design requires experienced silicon design engineers, and India did not have them initially; Intel
was able to find about 400, with advanced degrees and many years’ experience with U.S. firms, who
were willing to relocate. Excessive employee turnover in its Bangalore design center required special
management attention and programs to ensure continuity of design teams through the life of a
long project. Intel also found that it needed to foster a local research ecosystem so that Indian universities
were pursuing research in technologies and areas of interest to high-tech companies.
Sunnyvale-based AMD established a sales/support presence in India in 2001 through
its AMD Far East Ltd. (India) arm. It later opened a 38,000-square foot Bangalore very
large-scale integration (VLSI) design and software development center in 2004, part of
an initial $5 million, three-year investment commitment. In November 2007, it replaced that
center with a second 52,000-square foot silicon design and platform R&D site, coinciding with
release of AMD’s first quad-core processor, codenamed Barcelona, which had been designed
partly in Bangalore. Engineers at the new facility are leading development, testing, and optimization
of a new Shanghai 45-nanometer quad-core microprocessor.
With the 2006 acquisition of Array Technologies Inc. (ATI), AMD took over a $15 million,
48,000-square foot ATI design center in Hyderabad with 250 engineers, that designed mobile
handset chips, as well as 3D graphics and virtualization technology chips for Microsoft XBox
and Nintendo game stations. In January 2008, AMD opened a second Hyderabad R&D center
specializing in multimedia products and housing a center of excellence for audio technology.
AMD now employs 400–450 engineers in Hyderabad plus another 300 in Bangalore. The work
in Bangalore is mainly silicon design, product design, platform design, and customer support,
while Hyderabad focuses on ASICS design, software, graphics, chipsets, and media processors
for consumer electronics, from handheld devices to digital TV.
AMD’s Athlon chips have done well in India’s home, small office and educational markets, and
have made inroads, directly and through OEMs like Wipro and HCL, to enterprise customers
including the Indian Institute of Science (IIS), the Institute of Management (IIM), the Indian Army,
Tata Group, and state governments. As mentioned earlier, AMD will license its process technology
to Semindia for the planned Fab City ATMP facility outside Hyderabad as funds are raised and
construction goes forward. It also intends to be a customer once the plant is operational.
On the education side, AMD teamed with the American India Foundation (see Chapter 3) to set
up a computer/Internet learning laboratory at the Government High School, Doddanakundi in
Bangalore in November 2006. Another such lab has since been set up in Hyderabad. The program,
featuring personal computers and broadband connections for some 200 students, is part of
the American India Foundation’s Digital Equalizer program and is one of more than two dozen
programs operating worldwide as part of AMD’s 2004 50x15 Initiative to connect 50% of the
world’s population to the Internet by 2015.
AMD is also a technical partner with News Corp., Google, Nortel Networks and Linux developer
Red Hat in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative originated by Nicholas Negroponte
of the MIT Media Lab in 2005. Two million dollars in R&D has been donated for the project,
107