Panasonic announced that it will more than triple the size of its regional IC Design Center here, just several weeks after breaking ground on the new facility.
At its last February’s groundbreaking ceremony, Panasonic Semiconductor Asia Pte Ltd (PSCA) announced that it would invest $150 million (Singapore) for a new building and cutting-edge equipment to expand its assembly and test capacity in Singapore. PSCA will invest another $10 million in the development of its IC Design work force at the Panasonic Semiconductor Development Center of Asia (PSDA), the regional IC Design Center, which was established in 1988.
“We believe that we should focus on IC Design efforts and training the talent in Singapore, so as to leap forward in our business activities,” said Akinobu Minagawa, Managing Director of PSCA. “We are going to invest in our people. Our IC Design expansion this time is also in line with our basic business principle of grooming people before making products.”
He said that new employees would see many skills development initiatives that include overseas trainings, internship support schemes, learning programs to be conducted by professionals in the field and in-house technical guidance.
PSDA will increase its work force from 80 to more than 300 within the next five years. With the expansion of human resources, PSDA plans to pursue the development of product technologies called “Mixed Signal LSI,” which is a combination of digital and analog signal processing on one chip, and “Power Management LSI,” which is the combination and control of several power saving and regulation functions on one chip.
The target applications for the new product technologies are digital consumer electronics, such as mobile phones.
Singapore has a good pro-business infrastructure, and the government gives good support to the semiconductor industry, especially in manpower training, Minagawa said.
“The tertiary education system is also able to provide and fulfill the demand for technical staff who are usually bilingual, which is another competitive merit of Singapore’s manpower, in this globally linked economy,” he pointed out.
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