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Chip designer ARM has extended its design center in Bangalore, India, adding room to double the number of staff there to 700 from the 350 it currently employs.

The company said India may become its largest operation worldwide in the next two to three years, because the company is adding staff there faster than at its headquarters in Cambridge, England.

The Indian operation is already the second largest after Cambridge, where the company has 550 staff, Chief Operating Officer Tudor Brown said Thursday. Of the 350 staff employed in India, 95 percent are designers, while the rest are involved in global support of customers and administration functions, he said.

India has a far younger population than the U.K., making it interesting to recruit there, said Bill Parsons, executive vice president for human resources at ARM. Because of the education system in India, staff with the skills required by ARM are also more easily available, Parsons said. Having a design center in India helps ARM better address its large Asian market, he said.

ARM's design center was set up in India in 2004 following the company's acquisition of Artisan Components, a VLSI (very large scale integration) libraries company, in 2004. Artisan had a design operation employing 50 in Bangalore at the time.

ARM now employs 7,000 engineers worldwide. It doesn't make chips, but rather sells its designs to other companies for incorporation in their chips.

The design center in Bangalore is involved in designing ARM's processors and systems based on them, and developing VLSI component libraries. ARM also works with local engineering colleges to include courses around ARM technology.