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BANGALORE: Singapore based FTD Pvt. Ltd., has set up a Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) chip design and development company Edison Semiconductor Pvt. Ltd.
Claiming to be the first DRAM design company in India, Edison has been set up in collaboration with Japan’s leading supplier of DRAM chips Elpida Memory, Inc.
Edison Semiconductor’s current team of ten people, to be scaled up to 20 in a year’s time will be developing a full product cycle, according to N Ramakrishnan, president, FTD. To start with, the team will work on low power commodity DRAM chips–meant mostly for motherboards of portable applications. The companies plan to pump in about $25 million into the venture in three years’ time.
A wholly owned subsidiary of FTD, Edison Semiconducto is a product of FTD’s ‘insourcing’ business, which involves setting up individual companies as dedicated R&D and development centers, specific to a customer’s needs. Edison is its fifth such company based on the insourcing model. Some others include - Socrates for Toshiba and Avanti, now part of Synopsys.
According to the CEO of FTD group, P Bala, “Insourcing provides all the benefits of the traditional IT services and outsourcing models. The plus points are transparency, control, core R&D capability, IP protection and knowledge retention.”
Sixty percent of FTD’s $19 million business is generated from insourcing. FTD is looking at setting up similar ventures for companies operating in analog mixed signal IC and consumer printer business in the near future.
Applications that use DRAM has been rapidly expanding, said Shigeru Koshimaru
Executive Officer, Server & PC Division, Elpida Memory. While the growth rate for mobile DRAM chips is at 70-80 percent, the chips for the digital consumer market, which includes camcorders, DVD decoders, etc is growing at the rate of 35-40 percent. Elpida ships close to 25 million chips per month across various product lines.
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