Claus Weyrich, member of the managing board of Siemens AG, said the Siemens Corporate Technology Department Centre would offer software engineering support for the company's global product line.

"It will also work on embedded software for computer vision mainly in the surveillence area and also do research on client server technology for medical applications," Weyrich told reporters.

The centre, which will engage in high-end research, will start off with an employee base of 10 engineers and over "a couple of months" this will increase to 30 engineers, he said.

The other eight centres are located in Germany, the United States, Japan and China.

Siemens joins a host of other firms such as General Motors, US-based steelmaker Timken and software major Veritas to set up research and development hubs in Bangalore due to its vastly skilled talent pool and cheap labour.

India has 1,500 research institutes and churns out 200,000 graduate engineers every year.

"India is emerging as a hot-spot for research and development. Most of the top 10 IT majors have set up base in India," said Juergen Schubert, managing director of Siemens Limited.

He said India's expenditure on research and development was estimated at one percent of its gross domestic product and the figure was expected to increase to two percent by 2007 at 7.8 billion dollars.

"The whole of Siemens research and development budget almost equals that and during the last year we spent 6.7 billion dollars," Schubert said.

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