Tim Cook was on a visit to Israel Thursday to see the company’s new R&D offices in Haifa, north of Tel Aviv. These are the company’s second-largest R&D hub outside of the United States. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Cook may be visiting in order to check out two microprocessor chip design companies the tech giant has already bought: PrimeSense Ltd. and Anobit Technologies Ltd. Apple also hired away most of the Israeli employees from a chip-design division that Texas Instruments closed down in 2013. The offices for the hub are in Haifa, and for the past three years, Apple has been hiring staff for it. On the current job posting site for the country, Apple is looking to hire for a series of software and hardware positions including testing engineers and semiconductor and silicon design.
The chairman of the Israeli Semiconductor Club, “Apple’s Israeli acquisitions and its expanding local workforce show that the company is becoming more and more independent on the chip level, where it once had to rely on external suppliers.”
