KPIT Cummins sets up VLSI Design Centre in Bangalore

Srinivas R / Bangalore

Pune-based KPIT Cummins Infosystems has set up a Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design centre in Bangalore. The new design centre currently employs around 26 engineers, and the company plans to ramp up its headcount to more than 40 by end 2004.

KPIT Cummins provides software solutions to the manufacturing, banking and financial services and insurance (BFSI) sectors. “Our core competencies are application integration, SAP implementation, data warehousing and embedded systems. Some of our existing clients wanted to outsource the verification part of their chip development. So we entered this space,” said the chairman and group CEO of the company, S B Ravi Pandit. “For VLSI development, Bangalore is the right place because of the availability of skills,” he added.

“Verification is an important part of any chip development process. From the Bangalore centre we would verify our customers’ chips and also fix the bugs if we find them,” said Praveen Acharya, vice president-VLSI, KPIT Cummins Infosystems. Along with verification, the company is planning to have a small development team for the mixed signal process. “More than 60 percent of our staff will be deployed for verification and the rest of it will be working on the development activity,” he added.

In the first year of its operations, the company is investing around half a million dollars on the VLSI design centre.

“Chip verification is a capital intensive process. We need to invest in getting the right kind of tools for verification. So far we have invested around a quarter million dollars,” said Pandit.

The revenues of the company for the year ended March 31, 2004 were Rs 124.5 crore with Rs 14.42 crore net profits. For the current fiscal, the company expects to achieve over Rs 220 crore of turnover. “By 2006-07 we aim to achieve $100 million turnover,” added Pandit. KPIT Cummins employees around 800 software professionals in Pune and around 115 support staff working in its US, UK and Middle East subsidiaries. The company plans to have a larger presence in Bangalore over the next few years.

—The Financial Express