Agilent Technologies Announces Establishment of System-On-Chip Design Centre in India

Mumbai: Agilent Technologies (NYSE: A), the global leader offering test and measurement (T&M) solutions to the communications, electronics, life sciences and chemical analysis markets today announced the establishment of a system-on-chip (SOC) design center in India in Gurgaon, near New Delhi. This is Agilent's first integrated chip design centre in India. The centre will provide application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and system design services to customers of Agilent's ASIC products division, part of the semiconductor products group.

Agilent expects the SOC design centre to be staffed by approximately 50 engineers by the end of 2004. The SOC design centre will address all aspects of ASIC development from high-level design, logic design, physical design, verification, and system firmware design for industries such as networking, computing, imaging and storage applications. The new centre complements existing ASIC design centers in the US, Malaysia and Singapore.

According to Anita Manwani, vice president and general manager, global sourcing, "The system-on-chip design centre in Gurgaon offers local design expertise for Agilent's ASIC customers in Asia. We are seeing an increased level of technical design activity in this region, and this centre will facilitate real-time, interactive cooperation with our important customers." The design centre is a part of Agilent's captive centre in Gurgaon, Agilent Technologies International, that provides engineering and processing services to Agilent entities worldwide.

Agilent's three decades of ASIC design and manufacturing experience has enabled it to develop state-of-the-art hierarchical design methodology and design-for-test capability with a track record of first-pass success. These strengths, combined with an extensive IP portfolio, facilitate rapid integration of quality, high-performance ASICs for applications including communications, imaging and computing.

The launch of the SOC design center is a natural extension to the growing range of activities carried out by ATI India. Agilent's existing center in Gurgaon employs 1000 professionals working on back-end financial processing, Intranet development, engineering support, IT support and R&D.