Rambus opens design center in Bangalore, India

Rambus opens design center in Bangalore, India

K.C. Krishnadas (03/17/2005 7:55 AM EST) URL: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=159901398

BANGALORE, India — Memory interface licensing company Rambus Inc. opened a design center here Thurdsday (Mar. 17), aimed at expanding its design operations and better serving its customers in Asia, who account for half the company's sales. With 10 engineers now, the center is to be scaled up to 50 by the year-end, the company said. This center would start with a focus on developing cells and cores based on the company's technologies in the areas of PCI Express and DDR2 memory controller designs before taking on work in Fiber Channel and Serial accoridng to Samir Patel, vice president of the memory interface division at Rambus (Los Altos, Calif.). The Bangalore center is the third design center for the company. "We always wanted a design center in Asia," said Rambus chairman Geoff Tate. Other sites considered were in Taiwan, Japan and China but the talent pool in Bangalore and its English-speaking skills helped decide the matter, Tate said. Another Indian city, Pune, was also in the race but lost out on the availability engineers, he added. "We may have other design centers in Asia at some point in time," Tate said. Rambus, which in the past had outsourced circuit layout tasks to firms in India, would continue to do so, the company said. It is also looking at partnerships with premier engineering institutes here for joint research later on.