News: Bosch India plans to add 1,000 employees annually

(BL 25/08/2006) Bangalore - Robert Bosch India plans to add 1,000 employees per annum to its workforce. The company's headcount stands at 3,500 and will rise to 3,900 by year-end.

Of the 3,500 employees, 2,000 work in the automotive domain and 25 in the chip design and testing domain.

New chip testing facility

The company also inaugurated a chip testing facility within its campus in the city. The facility saw an investment of Rs 5.5 crore (1 million euros) in the facility, equipment and auxiliary systems including mixed signal automated test machines. Conforming to Class 100,000 (which is the standard for clean-room purity), the facility could be upgraded to Class 1,000, said Dr Walter Grote, Managing Director, Robert Bosch India. Testing is on 350nm chip process technology and is limited to packaged ICs (chips) and mixed signal devices.

The facility will be used for validating tester software used for testing in-house designed circuits and semiconductor devices.

It will perform part of the testing for the firm's planned fabrication unit (chip making facility) in Reutlingen in Germany, which is being constructed for 550 million euros.

With this new facility, the company adds to its existing engineering activities, which include Engine Control Unit design and testing and very large scale integration.

New Managing Director

Robert Bosch India will see a change of guard as Friedhelm Pickhard takes over as Managing Director from Walter Grote on September 1.

Prior to this role, he was Senior Vice-President of the business unit Driver Information Systems at Bosch/Blaupunkt in Germany.

Bosch envisions the future of Indian cars with more silicon and is increasing its focus on automotive electronic control units. "Electronic control units for emerging markets will be designed out of the Bangalore campus, and we will soon offer electronic control units for the Indian automotive industry," said Grote.

A luxury car contains around 200 application specific chips (ASICs). This is a global phenomenon, according to Bosch, and is replicated in India too. The future, they believe, promises to be more racy. Watch out for electronic stability system, electronic steering and braking systems and even electronic window and mirror controls in luxury class cars.