Rambus Opens Center in India

Computer memory maker Rambus opened its first design center in India
to better serve its growing customer base in Asia, the company said
Thursday.

This is only the second design center that Rambus supports. In 2004,
the company opened a similar facility in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when
it acquired serial link assets from Velio Communications. Rambus maintains regional offices in Tokyo, Japan, and Taipei, Taiwan.

Rambus said it would hire 50 employees before the end of the year. The plant is located in a new industrial complex in Koramangala, Bangalore.
The team will focus on repeatable cells and cores designed for multiple
process technologies.

The Bangalore engineering team will focus primarily on the
development of additional physical layer protocols — the lowest layer
in the networking model — and cores based on Rambus’ designs for PCI
Express , Fibre Channel ,
Serial ATA and the DDR2 memory controller.

“To help our customers meet the increasing demands of the global
marketplace, we are expanding our business to be more accessible on a
global scale,” Geoff Tate, Rambus chairman, said in a statement. “The
wealth of engineering talent in the Bangalore region convinced us that
this is the right location to establish a presence in India and will
help get our foundry-based interface designs to more customers to solve
their challenging problems in a cost-efficient manner.”

India has been the offshore destination of choice for programming
jobs, which have nearly tripled over the past three years from 27,000 to
an estimated 80,000, according to semiconductor industry research firm
In-Stat. In its May 2004 white paper India: Rise of a Mighty
Market
, In-Stat forecasts that by 200, Indian IT work and other
service exports will generate $70 billion and employ 6 million people.

More and more Silicon Valley expatriates are returning to India
and spawning start-ups in chips, computer equipment and wireless
technology, according to In-Stat analysts.

“Many Indian technologists and entrepreneurs came home after the
Internet bubble popped to sow the seeds of a California like start-up
culture in India,” the white paper said. “For example, a certain 26-year-
old engineer with a [$10,000-year-job] designing third-generation mobile phone
chips in Texas Instrument’s Indian research center remarks that, ‘Only 5
years ago I would have made a beeline for Silicon Valley, but now the sky
is the limit here in India.'”

In separate news, Rambus said it plans to announce a new
customer licensing agreement under the Rambus-Cadence reseller program
next week. This is the first customer announcement since the
Rambus-Cadence partnership was formed in July 2004.

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