For competitive reasons, the company has been vague about how many engineers it will hire and how much it will invest in its new Indian operation. ATI chief technology officer Adrian Hartog said it would make a multi-million dollar investment in the country and hire more than a hundred engineers this year.
Unlike some offshore chip-design outfits, in which engineers sometimes do just grunt work, such as place and route, ATI’s Indian-based teams will design whole chips, said spokesman Chris Evenden.
By giving engineers responsibility for entire chips, ATI hopes to be able to offer high-level jobs that will target top talent in the country, he said. Engineers will develop next-generation audio and digital multimedia chips for personal computers, cell phones and high-definition TVs.
Ontario, Canada-based ATI made its first move into India earlier this year when it bought CuTe Solutions, which has a center in Hyderabad. The terms of the deal, which was announced in February and closed last month, were not disclosed.
ATI bought CuTe for the company’s audio technology, most software, which it has used in its cell-phone graphic chips. Employees of CuTe, now called ATI Technologies India Private, were retained by ATI and form the nucleus of its Indian-based hardware design team, Evenden said.
