Qimonda to set up development center in China

Qimonda announced Tuesday plans to establish a new development center in Suzhou, China, dedicated to design and test memory products.

To be built at an investment cost of about US$20 million, the new facility will be based in Qimonda's existing assembly and testing site for memory IC (integrated circuit), in the country's Suzhou Industrial Park, located 80 kilometers west of Shanghai.

Development center activities and the hiring of engineers are scheduled to commence from Oct. 1 this year, Qimonda said in a statement, noting that it targets to employ 200 engineers within five years.

The new Qimonda Memory Products Development Center is expected to complement its existing design center in Xian, China, while focusing on the full product development cycle including product specification, circuit design and application test for computing and consumer memories, the company said.

According to the memory chip maker, additional development capacities from the center will serve Qimonda's target to further expand and diversify its product portfolio.

"The new development center in Suzhou is another strategic step to expand our activities in the Asian market, which represented more than 30 percent of Qimonda's revenues in the last quarter," Loh Kin Wah, the company's president and CEO, said in a statement.

"We expect fruitful synergies with our existing backend facility in Suzhou to result in cost reductions by sharing existing infrastructure, central functions and expensive installations, such as the test equipment," Loh added.

In April this year, Qimonda unveiled plans to establish in Singapore its first fully-owned 300-millemeter manufacturing plant in the Asia-Pacific region, at a cost of some 2 billion euros (US$2.7 billion) over the next five years.

Headquartered in Munich, Germany, Qimonda was spun off from Infineon last May and sells DRAM memory products.