14 DAY TRIAL // HCL, one of India's largest outsourcing companies, is setting up a center for embedded designs around IBM's Power processor architecture. This is dubbed as the first design center outside IBM. HCL officials said that the new center will have about 25 staff members in the beginning.
The new HCL IM center will design the Power architecture in applications for networking, wireless and auto market. Moreover, HCL will offer customers more options, including chip design and board level design.
The Power architecture already received customizations from HCL at the request of customers, but the agreement with IBM obliges HCL to focus more on this area. In Noida, near Delhi, HCL bought the right to use and sublicense IBM's PowerPC 405 and PowerPC 440 embedded processor cores. Also, the agreements include certain associated peripheral cores.
HCL officials said that if customers require it, they will continue to offer designs around the ARM embedded RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) microprocessor core from Arm Holdings PLC in Cambridge, England. HCL also has a growing business in VLSI (very large scale integration) and system designs.