by CIO Staff

Nvidia Acquires Indian Co. for Engineering Staff

News
Mar 17, 20062 mins
Data Center

Graphics chip maker Nvidia has acquired Pace Soft Silicon in Pune, India, to increase its number of engineers in the country, according to a Nvidia executive.

The key benefit from the acquisition, which was completed in December, was quick access to a team of talented engineers, said Alain Tiquet, Nvidia’s group director of marketing for EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Asia), in an interview Friday.

Tiquet did not disclose the acquisition’s price. Pace had been focused on video software for mobile devices.

The Pace development team of about 60 staff is the nucleus for Nvidia’s new design center in Pune. The center is currently working on software for GPUs (graphics processing units) and handheld devices, Tiquet said.

Software expertise has become very important for mobile phones and consumer entertainment products, as there are no software standards for these products, according to Tiquet. Nvidia’s focus is on building the software layer that will enable equipment makers to get the best out of the company’s chips.

Down the line, the Pune center may do work in other areas as well, including products relevant to the Indian market, Tiquet added.

The Pune center currently has 150 staff, and the company plans to increase that number to 600 by the end of this year.

Nvidia of Santa Clara, Calif., set up a chip-design center, which has 120 staff, in Bangalore, India, last year. The company is planning to increase that center’s staff as well, Tiquet said.

A number of multinational technology companies are acquiring Indian companies to add development staff in the country. SiRF Technology Holdings, a San Jose, Calif., vendor of chips and software for consumer GPS (global positioning system) applications, announced earlier this year that it acquired Impulsesoft, a Bluetooth embedded software company in Bangalore. The acquisition gave SiRF access to Impulsesoft’s development staff and Bluetooth intellectual property.

-John Ribeiro, IDG News Service

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