Chip interface maker opens Bangalore unit

Rambus Inc, maker of high speed chip interfaces, announced on Friday it will open a design centre in Bangalore. It will cater to a growing clientele in the Asia Pacific, and will strengthen Rambus's global presence.

A company release said, Rambus will hire some 50 engineers for the centre by December to work on repeatable cells and cores designed for multiple process technologies.

Geoff Tate, chairman of the Rambus board, inaugurated the new centre and said: "The Bangalore team will help get our foundry-based interface designs to more customers." The team will focus on development of additional PHYs (physical layer in a network) and cores based on Rambus' proprietary technologies.

The centre will work on industry standard designs like peripheral component interconnect express, Intel-defined technology for a processor to talk to say a graphics card.

In addition to this, it will work on Fibre Channel, usually optic fibre-based high speed data transfer technology and serial advanced technology attachment (ATA).

ATA is used for direct access of memory, for instance in CD-ROMs.

It will also work on double data rate 2 memory control designs, a set of electronic memories that make up the random access memory which is fast becoming the norm in computers.

Last year, the Los Altos, California-based company opened a design centre in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when it acquired serial link assets from Velio Communications Inc. Rambus has regional offices in Tokyo and Taipei.

The firm works by licensing its technologies, specialising in inventing and designing high speed chip interfaces. The firm's products find applications in computers, consumer electronics and communications equipment, the release said.