More than 100 jobs are to be created in Dublin by a US company that develops software for the commercial aviation industry.

Viasat, which already employs around 100 people in the city, is to set up a European Software Centre of Excellence here.

The roles will be across a variety of areas including software engineering and development, as well as design, support, customer success, implementation consultancy, and project management.

The announcement comes as the company opens a new expanded office here, with capacity for up to 250 staff.

The firm plans to develop products beyond connected aircraft software, to include further software and mobile services for the maritime industry, residential broadband customers, and government systems.

The Dublin office will also play a major role in the development of Viasat-3, a trio of geostationary high capacity satellites that will deliver more than a terabit per second of network capacity to locations across the planet.

The team here will work on the Viasat 3 software and applications that will run on top of the infrastructure.

The strong talent base here is one of the main reasons behind the investment, the company says.

"We are expanding in Dublin as part of our overall objective to strengthen our regional service capabilities, in order to enhance our collaboration with customers and partners throughout Europe, and further build software and technology expertise in the region," said Rick Baldridge, Viasat's President and Chief Operating Officer.

"We believe the strong talent base located in Ireland will greatly expand our technical and business presence in Europe, and enable us to rapidly respond to new global broadband opportunities across a number of industry sectors."

The NASDAQ-listed company has its headquarters in California and also has a research and development centre in Amsterdam, as well as offices in Farnborough in the UK and Lausanne in Switzerland.