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SanDisk to expand Indian design center

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE: Sunnyvale, US-based SanDisk, a maker of flash memory products today announced that it would ramp up the headcount of its R&D center in Bangalore. The company which started the flash memory design center in India last June with ten engineers plans to increase the number to 50 in a year's time. Besides having a dedicated captive center, SanDisk also has design services partnerships with Wipro and RelQ.

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The Indian center will work on core development such as NAND Flash, ASIC and firmware. Sanjay Mehrotra, COO, SanDisk ruled out the issue of the company stopping its current engagements with Wipro and RelQ. “ Our captive unit will focus on core development while our partners will work on areas that are not IP-heavy,” he said.

The Indian design center is the fifth design center for the company after US, Israel, Japan and Scotland. SanDisk's main products include flash memory cards, USB drives and MP3 players. Apart from establishing a product development base in India, the company is also planning to firm up marketing and distribution efforts.

Mehrotra said that flash media was growing beyond storage to encompass more features such as security, real time operating system, ASIC technology, CPU and third party applications like digital rights management.

The company clocked revenues of $2.3 billion in 2005 and is the largest seller of flash cards world wide. SanDisk follows a vertical integration business model which includes tie-ups with global OEMs for its products as well as SanDisk's own branded products.

Yonam Cedar, executive VP, Corporate engineering, SanDisk said that rapid technology transitions were necessary to achieve lower costs. “These would enable us to pursue new markets, enable stable margins, stay competitive and make it possible to have more MB per wafer.”

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