SanDisk opens flash memory design centre in B'lore

SanDisk Corporation, the leader in flash data storage card products, on Tuesday announced opening of its flash memory device design centre in Bangalore.

In doing so it is seeking to leverage the highly skilled technical talent pool available in India.

The centre presently employs 10 engineers and the number will be raised to 40-50 in the next 12 months, Sanjay Mehrotra, SanDisk's co-founder and chief operating officer informed reporters here.

He said that the design centre 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, also known as gatekeepers for data in flash memory cells.

Mehrotra said that India was expected to become a major market for SanDisk products with the rise in consumer demand for mobile phones and MP3 players, "We need to have a solid presence in the country to promote our brand and to leverage the opportunity of growth in the retail sector," he said.

"As we increase our production of flash memory this year, we intend to focus more on India by adding more distributors and storefronts," he added.

Prior to opening its design centre in India, SanDisk was working in India with its non-captive design partners Wipro and RelQ. The combined strength of the employees engaged by both these partners for SanDisk was about 75, said Mehrotra.

SanDisk which focusses on digital consumer markets including digital cameras, mobile phones, USB flash drives, MP3 players and gaming, designs, develops, manufactures and markets flash storage card products used in a variety of electronic systems.

Flash storage cards allow data to be stored in a compact, removable format. Mehrota said that 10 per cent of the company's total revenue was collected as royalty from IP rights.

The company holds over 350 patents and licenses its technology to several companies.

Mehrotra said, about 80 per cent of the company's sale was in the retail chain. "Our products are sold through more than 1.5 lakh retail storefronts worldwide that include 27,000 in the Asia Pacific region and 14,000 in Japan."

SanDisk, the original inventor of flash storage cards, has research facilities in Israel, Japan and Scotland, in addition to its extensive R&D activities in Silicon Valley in California.

Besides, the company has teams of process, device and design engineers located at semiconductor fabrication plants in Japan, in a joint partnership with Toshiba.