Sinisa Krajnovic, head of development unit networks at Ericsson.
Publisher of Silicon Hills News
Ericsson announced Thursday plans to open a design center in Austin with 80 employees by next June.
The center is focused on microelectronics and creating products for the 5G telecommunications marketplace.
“This R&D center will be one of our key centers when it comes to 5G ASIC development,” said Sinisa Krajnovic, head of development unit networks at Ericsson.
It’s Ericsson’s third global design center. The telecommunications giant, which has its North American headquarters based in Plano, Texas, also has a design center at its global headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden and in China.
This center will work closely with those other teams, but after a worldwide search, Ericsson selected Austin because of the telecommunications and semiconductor talent here and the city’s technology ecosystem, Krajnovic said.
The Austin team will be developing the core microelectronics for Ericsson’s 5G next-generation products.
“They are truly the brain for our mobile infrastructure,” Krajnovic said.
The Austin ASIC Design Center is open now and recruitments are ongoing, Krajnovic said.
ASIC stands for Application Specific Integrated Circuit. Such microelectronics are at the core of all Ericsson Radio Systems and can be seen as processors that are specially made for the computation needs of mobile infrastructure. Ericsson’s processors are 100 times faster and more cost-efficient than general off the shelf processors, Krajnovic said. It’s a key competitive advantage to have application specific processors, he said.
Ericsson is hiring experienced ASIC developers and architects, Krajnovic said.
“They have to have the right competence and experience,” he said. “We are not looking for beginners in this space.”
Ericsson is accelerating its “speed into this 5G journey,” Krajnovic said. “We’ve done a quite thorough analysis of the whole world and after this analysis, it all points towards Austin.”
“There are few reasons for that,” Krajnovic said. “Austin is one of the largest and fastest growing and strongest tech ecosystems, particularly in this domain. Austin is the place to be. It is the place where all the ecosystem is being developed.”
Austin has the top experts in this ASIC domain. Austin is also home to a lot of Ericsson’s suppliers and partners.
“The Silicon, microelectronics domains, are very heavily present in Austin,” Krajnovic said. “We believe this is a great place to be.”
Ericsson has about 15 employees in Austin currently working on customer-specific projects, but this will be the company’s first major site in Austin.
Krajnovic said Ericsson is confident they will find the workers they need in Austin.
“This is super cool work,” he said. “They are going to work in the forefront of the 5G technologies.”
Ericsson plans its first commercial 5G product coming out in 2019 and for deployment that year, Krajnovic said.
“Those teams in Austin will be a very important part of that journey,” he said.
Ericsson has temporary offices for the design center while it’s looking for a permanent site near Austin’s other processor manufacturers, Krajnovic said. It will be working closing with the major Silicon fab houses in Austin, he said.
For more information on the jobs, go to the Ericsson career site and search for Austin.
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