The company plans to take its India office headcount to 1,500 professionals by 2025, Silicon Labs CEO Matt Johnson told ET.
Silicon Labs’ India office in Hyderabad is its largest global centre for engineering and wireless connectivity.
The company had acquired the Hyderabad site through its acquisition of US-based Redpine Signals’ wi-fi and Bluetooth business along with a wide patent portfolio in April 2020 for $308 million in cash.
Since then, it has scaled its employee count at Silicon Labs India office is in Hyderabad’s Hitec City – a tech cluster housing several global capability centres (GCCs) including that of Microsoft in India – to more than 500, Johnson said.
The Redpine acquisition gave Silicon Labs key capabilities including low-power wi-fi assets and key intellectual properties (IP) related to interoperability that would be necessary to run connected devices environments across thousands of devices, according to a Silicon Labs release.
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Silicon Labs has been investing heavily in what it calls the ‘Matter platform’, a code development platform for interoperability and communication between various IoT systems. While there’s been an explosion in connected devices, their varied environments cannot converge seamlessly to expand the universe of these connected devices. Silicon Labs, according to a recent blog post, believes there will be 27 billion connected devices worldwide by 2025.
Speaking about the drive among nations to seed semiconductor and electronics manufacturing ecosystems, particularly by Asian economies, Johnson said the intent has been to “localise” and “decouple” from dependencies as much as possible. “There’s still more demand out there globally than there is supply, with the complexity of the supply chain that exists,” he said. “We got ourselves here (globalised supply chain) over decades, so to unwind that is going to take a similar amount of time. It won’t happen quickly, and it also must work from an economical perspective, too.”
