By Kate Yuan

US chipmaker Marvell is said to lay off most of its R&D teams in China, and only keep some design service personnel in Nanjing of eastern China’s Jiangsu Province, JW Insights reported on October 26.

Sources told JW Insights that staff involved in this layoff will be given a two-month buffer period and severance payments. However, two departments are expected to complete work handover within this week, including the chip validation team of the switch division in Shanghai and the post-silicon validation team of the storage division.

If this is true, the company will be the third overseas chipmaker to conduct large-scale layoffs in China this year, said the JW Insights report. In January this year, Micron shut its Shanghai DRAM design department of more than 100 staff. Texas Instruments abolished China’s MCU R&D team and moved the original MCU R&D line to India in May.

Founded in 1995 and headquartered in Silicon Valley, Marvell has its China operation with R&D centers in Shanghai, Nanjing, Chengdu and Beijing. At its peak time, Marvell once had nearly 1,000 employees in China and its international R&D center in Shanghai used to have more than 800 staff, making it the third largest R&D center after the US headquarter and Israel.

Marvel’s Shanghai R&D center is involved in mostly providing advanced technology development services for China Mobile and consumer electronics markets. There were plans before to expand the Shanghai R&D center to thousands of people, making it the largest R&D center in the world.