Motorola to build $29m software centre in Scotland

Motorola is to invest £20 million ($29.2 million) in Scotland, with the foundation and construction of a cellphone-oriented software development facility.

The Motorola Technology Centre, to be built alongside Scottish Enterprise's Alba Centre in Livingston, West Lothian, will require the creation of 550 jobs over the next five years. Motorola already employs some 6500 staff in Scotland, and is the country's largest manufacturing employer.

Construction work on the plant will commence in 2002, but the Centre will go into operation before then within the Alba campus.

Work at the Centre will focus on code designed to make Motorola's phone and chip production operations more efficient. In essence, that means working on getting more components onto each chip - the Centre's job will be to create the software tools used to develop and test their designs.

"Motorola's decision to site this highly significant development here highlights the huge strides Scotland has made in becoming a global centre of excellence in communications, software and system on chip design," said Scotland's First Minister, Donald Dewar.

"I believe that this investment is a milestone in the development of the industry in Scotland and will send out a signal to the microelectronics industry that Scotland is the place to be in this technology," he added.

The Alba campus' own focus is on system-on-a-chip and system-level integration R&D, expertise Motorola clearly wants to harness through its own Centre. ®