Tuesday, September 20 2005 15:43 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Bangalore: Cypress Semiconductor Corp. (NYSE: CY) today (Sep 20, 2005) marked its tenth anniversary in India, announcing plans to develop a $10 million campus locally for strategic product design. The company expects to triple its India workforce to support this initiative.

"We're looking for a two- to three-acre site to build a Cypress campus," said Paul Keswick, vice president of new product development at Cypress. "We expect the site will contain multiple buildings of 70,000 square feet each. Our vision is to grow our India staff from more than 200 employees today to 600 or more by the end of 2007, depending on industry growth cycles."

According to Keswick, Cypress's India design centres will continue supporting all of the company's business units, including its most-important and leading edge products. "As we develop new products in such areas as non-volatile memory and image sensors, these design centres will be a big part of that growth as well," Keswick said.

Cypress opened its first India design centre in Bangalore in 1995, specializing on USB chips, SRAMs, framers and clocks. Its contributions have included the design of Cypress's enCoRe™ low-speed USB micro-controllers; the 3.3V Neuron® chips for building automation and industrial control networks; a 2.5-Gbps GFP (Generic Framing Procedure) SONET/SDH framer; the industry's fastest 16-Mbit asynchronous SRAM; the industry's lowest power, high-speed USB controllers; and the industry's first field-programmable spread-spectrum clock generators for electromagnetic interference reduction. It has also played an important role in developing Cypress's PSoC™ Programmable System on Chip™ mixed signal arrays.

Cypress added a second technical centre in Hyderabad in 2003, which has produced designs for network search engines, 90-nm-scale logic devices and systems engineering.

Over the past 10 years, Cypress's India design teams have acquired more than 40 U.S patents and published multiple technical papers. In addition, the company's Information Technology Group (ITG) in India has led several initiatives for mission-critical applications in manufacturing, finance and sales. ITG supports Cypress's global network on a 24 x 7 basis, and has deployed numerous tools to help improve efficiency across the company.

"Cypress offers multiple benefits to its employees that are unmatched by other companies," said Nagendra Cherukupalli, vice president of Cypress's Asian design centres. "Employees can work on leading-edge designs and have solid ownership of these projects. We also offer a very solid benefits package including stock purchase plans, stock options, and educational assistance that make Cypress a great place to work."