New centre focuses on design and embedded electronics
Chinese telecom vendor Huawei has just opened its next European R&D site in Sophia Antipolis, in France. The new hub will focus on chipset design and embedded electronics, it says.
Huawei, which has been present in French market since 2003, says the country plays an important role in its ecosystem and additionally Sophia Antipolis offers an easy access to skilled engineers with good knowledge of electronic devices and software.
According to the plans, the company will fill in around 170 vacancies by 2017 in France. At the moment it hires 20 researchers with the majority of them joining from Texas Instruments. At the end of this year it hopes to increase this number to 30, it says.
Apart from works on the microelectronics and software development, other key tasks of the new centre include improving the quality of smartphone cameras and building the Image Signal Processor (ISP).
In August Huawei opened an innovation centre in Waldorf, Germany, which focuses on the integrated solutions and performance and standards testing. In total, Huawei has currently 17 R&D centres located in eight European countries: Belgium, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Sweden and the UK.
“We are very proud of this R&D site, which represents perfectly what France can provide in terms of skills on the global IT market. This inauguration is a symbolic step for Huawei in France, a sign of its increasing collaboration with the French digital ecosystem. Huawei has great ambitions for the coming months and Sophia Antipolis is only the first step in its French R&D development strategy,” says Song Kai, CEO of Huawei France.
