SanDisk opens device design center

By siliconindia staff writer   |   Tuesday, 07 February 2006, 20:30 IST
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BANGALORE: It took 15 years for Sunnyvale-based SanDisk Corporation to hit $1 billion in revenues and after that just two years to scale up to $2 billion. Analysts predict SanDisk has a couple of years to breach the $3 billion mark in revenues. Founded in 1988, the company is one of the world’s foremost suppliers of flash memory data storage card products. On Tuesday, the company formally announced the opening of SanDisk India Device Design Center Pvt. Ltd. in Bangalore. The Design Center at Bangalore started last July with a team of 10 engineers working on flash memory design and ASIC design for controllers. Initially the center will concentrate on projects involving NAND memory -- the heart of SanDisk's flash memory cards, USB drives and MP3 players. The Chief Operating Officer and the co-founder of the company, Sanjay Mehrota who were present to announce the official opening said, “The Indian team is expected to expand by 50 in the course of next 12 months. The investment is primarily people-intensive.” Mehrotra went on to add that the Indian market is at present minor with the potential being in just a few million dollars but eventually hopes that it will contribute 2-4 percent of worldwide sales. "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 Mehrotra. The company expects India to become a major market for SanDisk products as a result of booming consumer demand for mobile phones and MP3 audio players. Although the India Design Center is SanDisk's first stand-alone facility in India, the company already has engineers assigned to several projects to two SanDisk technology partners in India, Wipro and RelQ. In total, SanDisk currently has approximately 60 engineers among the three facilities. In addition to its extensive R&D activities in Silicon Valley, California, SanDisk has research facilities in Israel, Japan and Scotland.

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