Microchip to invest $300 million in India, opens R&D centre in Hyderabad

Only days after semiconductor players Micron, Applied Materials and Lam Research announced their plans to invest in India, another US-based semiconductor company Microchip Technology said on Monday that it will invest $300 million in the country to expand its operations. 

The company has further opened a new research and development (R&D) centre in Hyderabad’s One Golden Mile Office Tower, a 168,000-square-foot centre, which has a capacity for 1,000 employees. This development centre joins two others in Bengaluru and Chennai, in addition to sales offices in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and New Delhi.

This planned investment will focus on improvements to Microchip’s Bengaluru and Chennai facilities and the newly opened R&D centre in Hyderabad, expanding and enhancing its engineering labs, serving the technical and business support requirements of a large and growing set of customers in India, the company said in a statement.

It added that this would boost hiring as the company taps into India’s growing talent pool, sponsoring technical consortia and supporting academic institutions and programmes and is launching a variety of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs tailored to regional needs.

Microchip has approximately 2,500 employees in India, working in semiconductor design and development, sales and support, IT infrastructure and application engineering operations, supporting the company’s 2,000 customers in the region in the industrial, automotive, data centre, aerospace, defence, communications and consumer industries.

“Microchip is making a significant strategic commitment to growing our operations in India, whose meteoric growth has established it as one of the top sources of business and technical resources in our sector,” said Ganesh Moorthy, President and CEO of Microchip. “Our investments here will enable us to both benefit from and contribute to the country’s increasingly important role in the global semiconductor industry,” he added.

The India Electronics and Semiconductor Association (IESA) and Counterpoint Research recently reported that India’s semiconductor market is expected to reach $64 billion by 2026, which is nearly triple its 2019 size of $22.7 billion.

India welcomed a flurry of deals within its semiconductor industry during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the US last month. American chipmaker Micron Technology said that it would invest up to $825 million in a new chip assembly and test facility in Gujarat, India, its first factory in the country that will create up to 5,000 new direct jobs in the region. The company said that the total investment in the facility will be $2.75 billion and of that 50% will come from the Indian central government and 20% from the state of Gujarat. 

Further, Applied Materials announced its plans to invest $400 million over the next four years in a new engineering centre in India, which is expected to be located near the company’s existing facility in Bengaluru and is likely to support more than $2 billion of planned investments and create 500 new advanced engineering jobs, the company said.

Semiconductor manufacturing equipment supplier, Lam Research also said last month it plans to train 60,000 engineers in India in the next 10 years to boost India’s semiconductor education and workforce development. During PM Modi’s state visit to the US, the company said that the training on nanotechnologies will be facilitated by Lam Research’s virtual nanofabrication environment platform, Semiverse Solutions.