Rambus opens design center in Bangalore, India

Electronic Engineering Times ^ | March 17,2005 | K.C. Krishnadas

[Dat Mon]

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.

[Dat Mon]

Remember what Ive said in previous posts about one upcoming trend in semiconductor design...intellectual property..ie SOC chip cores developed in India..then passed down the design chain to China or Taiwan for integration and implementation / mass manufacture.

India, Israel, Ireland, Eastern Europe,Russia,Taiwan, China....all striving for engineering dominance in their own way for the future.

[GOP_1900AD]

Putting on my lesser of evils hat, though, if asked to choose between doing business in, sourcing from and outsourcing to India Vs the PRC, India wins hands down. At the end of the day, we share the same legal system (albeit with much corruption in the Indian version) and generally have a classical liberal (in the philosophical-economic, not political sense) outlook. The PRC are likely to become an outright enemy (and maybe already are) where as India at worst may become a backstabber out of convenience.

[Kevin OMalley]

There goes that giant Whooshing sound again.

[Dat Mon]

Youre right. India is much much preferred over China.

I just hate to see cutting edge engineering for American companies being done abroad.