India plays growing role in Intel R&D

About half of the work on Intel's recently announced "teraflop research chip" was done in India, highlighting the country's growing importance to Intel's research and development efforts.

Researchers in Oregon and Bangalore designed the programmable chip, which crams 80 cores onto a fingernail-size device that draws just 62 watts of power, said Vasantha Erraguntla, engineering manager at the India Research Center. Erraguntla led the 20-person design team in Bangalore that worked on the logic, circuit and physical design of the chip.

Intel first discussed the research processor earlier this month, saying it can perform more than a trillion floating point operations per second, or a teraflop. It doesn't plan to bring that particular device to market, but the researchers in Bangalore are now looking at the implications of putting such a powerful processor into a system.

The chip has spurred research projects in the areas of cooling, high-bandwidth interconnects and power management, said Vittal Kini, director of the research center, which was set up in 2004 and is the latest addition to the India Development Center in Bangalore.

Besides working on the teraflop chip, some 50 researchers there are working on other areas of circuit and systems research.

The Development Center is fast emerging as a key research and design location for Intel. The company has about 3,000 staff in India, of which close to 2,900 are in research and development.

Indian engineers work on the design of chips and chipsets, reference designs, system software, and packaging technologies, said Sandeep Shah director of the mobility group at the India Development Center. Indian engineers have full ownership of the development of key Intel chips for the server and mobile market, he added.