Center will add 50 engineers to do core development work in flash memory, ASIC, and firmware SanDisk has set up a design center in Bangalore, India, that will do core design work for its flash memory products, the company announced Tuesday.The center currently employs 10 engineers and will add another 50 over the next year, Sanjay Mehrotra, the company’s cofounder and chief operating officer, told reporters in Bangalore.SanDisk, of Sunnyvale, California, already outsources work to Wipro and RelQ Software of Bangalore. The companies have about 75 staff doing work for SanDisk. The design center will do core development work in the areas of flash memory, ASIC (application specific integrated circuits) and firmware. Wipro will also do some parts of ASIC design, while RelQ will do testing and validation work, Mehrotra said.SanDisk already has design centers in Israel, Japan, Scotland and the U.S., which employ more than 400 staff, said Yoram Cedar, SanDisk’s executive vice president of corporate engineering and general manager of its handset business unit.Flash media has gone beyond plain storage to more sophisticated devices that include an operating system, processors and security features such as digital rights management (DRM), Cedar said. SanDisk has diversified its business to include MP3 players, since flash memory is the key component of the cost of such products, Mehrotra said. The company’s involvement in both design and manufacturing, including a joint venture with Toshiba for manufacturing flash memory, enables it to keep costs down, he added. Technology Industry