Freescale Semiconductor has opened a major semiconductor R&D facility at East Kilbride in Scotland.
The facility will become the US chip company’s global centre of excellence for microcontrollers, such as Qorivva, designed for the automotive market.
The semiconductor R&D centre will have over 170 staff and represents an investment of £1.2m by Freescale over the last nine months.
"The choice of East Kilbride was a hard-headed business decision by the group," Martin Burns, Freescale's UK country manager told Electronics Weekly.
"Scotland was not the only place the company could have created the facility," said Burns.
"It represents a major commitment for the East Kilbride facility for the foreseeable future," said Burns.
The centre will not carry out microcontroller design, but will be responsible for systems engineering and product definition for in-car automotive applications such as high-end graphics dashboards and active vehicle safety systems.
According to Burns, the facility has important skills which he believes will also be relevant to other areas including electric vehicles and industrial applications like smart metering.
The centre has also joint research programmes with the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow looking at multicore design and driver assistance systems technologies.
There are also plans to form links with other UK universities in the area of automotive engineering.
The R&D facility is situated on the site of the former East Kilbride manufacturing plant which was first set up in 1969 by Motorola, from which Freescale was spun off in 2004.
Freescale discontinued manufacturing on the site in 2009.
www.freescale.com
