In recent weeks India, has become a hot spot for semi development and the site of many overseas expansion projects, as several major industry players announce plans to set up shop in the country.
Dell, PMC-Sierra, PortalPlayer and Elpida have all stated intentions to set up Indian outposts since the beginning of the year. Today Sunnyvale, Calif.-based SanDisk Corp. joined the growing list of companies looking to increase its opportunity through India.
SanDisk’s new R&D center, called SanDisk India Device Design Center, is located in Bangalore, where engineers will work on the core elements of the company’s flash memory products.
“India is a logical place for us to expand our global network of research and development centers because of the great talent pool here and because of our existing relationships with companies that support us in hardware, firmware and software testing,” said Sanjay Mehrotra, SanDisk COO and co-founder, in a statement. “As we increase our production of flash memory this year, we intend to focus more attention on India, including the addition of more distributors and storefronts.”
Due to booming consumer demand for mobile phones and MP3 audio players, the SanDisk India Design Center will initially concentrate on projects involving NAND memory – the heart of SanDisk’s flash memory cards, USB drives and MP3 players. Later, the team will be expanded to include development work on ASIC controllers, which are the gatekeepers for data in flash memory cells.
Although the India Design Center is SanDisk’s first stand-alone facility in India, the company already has engineers assigned to several projects at two SanDisk technology partners in India, third party R&D services provider Wipro and RelQ, an independent software testing and validation company. SanDisk also has R&D centers in Silicon Valley, Israel, Japan and Scotland.
