US-Based Micron To Quadruple Hiring In India

US-headquartered $30-billion Micron Technology plans a four-fold increase in hiring for its research & development (R&D) operations in India to support its global manufacturing operations.

The semiconductor company has R&D operations in Hyderabad and the facility also provides design support for various storage products, including DRAM and NAND.

Tapping talent

“Micron goes wherever the talent is. Just like, we have expanded in Singapore in recent years, there a strong pool of talent in India as well. As our market opportunities are growing and we need to tap the top talent pool in all major geographies,” Sanjay Mehrotra, President and Chief Executive Officer of Micron, told BusinessLine during an interaction at the launch of the company’s expanded NAND flash memory fabrication operations in Singapore recently.

As Micron is building various capabilities and support functions at its Hyderabad operations, it seeks to hire people from top institutions in India. “Today, we have about 500 people in Hyderabad and expect to grow this strength to 2,000 over the next couple of years,” said Manish Bhatia, Executive Vice-President, Global Operations, Micron.

The plan is to make Indian operations a hub for IT development and some other capabilities to manage its global manufacturing operations. “We will be expanding our engineering areas to have complete end-product development capabilities over time,” he added.

The latest multi-billion dollar expansion in Singapore and its massive hiring plans in India come on the back of growing data-driven business opportunities beyond personal computers.

The storage products industry is structurally in a different place now. The markets are diversifying from just PC-centric to mobile, data centre, cloud computing, Internet of Things and autonomous mobility. Industrial IoT and consumer markers are also becoming larger. Now, cloud computing and enterprise data centre are driving huge consumption of Micron’s NAND and DRAM products. “Two or three years ago, cloud and data centres were a small part of our industry. Today, they have become one of the fastest-growing segments within the industry segment. Also, automotive is another large area and one of the fastest-growing segments for the consumption of DRAM and NAND flash memories,” said Mehrotra. Autonomous driving, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are all dependent on vast quantities of information. And as 5G technologies dramatically speed wireless communication, they will enable a truly intelligent network of billions of devices and every new device will create new streams of data.

Transform information

“Much of that information is only useful if it is acted on promptly. To transform information to intelligence, devices must move and analyse data very quickly. That speed is the very heart of what our technologies unleash. Micron accelerates the transformation of information into intelligence,” he said

The latest expansion at the company’s Singapore operations will allow it to move its flash memory production to more advanced 3D NAND technology nodes — its current technology has 128 layers of cells, enough to put a terabyte in a single chip — that’s storage for more than a quarter million songs or 100 high-definition movies; storage density that would’ve been unimaginable just a few years ago.―The Hindu Business Line