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Semiconductors
of sunshine a year and solar doesn’t require infrastructure”—as well as in the mobile communications
space—“You’ve got farmers out in the fields on their cell phones searching for the markets
with the best prices for their crops, meanwhile no one in the village has a landline phone.”
SanDisk Corp., founded in 1988, invented flash memory storage cards and is a leading
manufacturer and seller of storage cards and flash drives for digital cameras, phones
and audio/video players; plug-in USB memory drives for computers; and a line of
lower-cost MP3 players that compete with Apple’s iPod. It has been steadily ramping up its
presence in India (in addition to Japan, Israel and Scotland) since 2004, following growth in
emerging consumer markets for mobile phones and consumer electronics. SanDisk president
and chief operating officer Sanjay Mehrotra, whose background includes B.S. and M.S. degrees in
electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley, has led the expansion.
In January 2004, SanDisk began selling its full line of storage, media, and wi-fi cards, as well as
USB memory drives in New Delhi and Mumbai. In February 2006, the firm opened its India
Device Design Center in Bangalore with 10 engineers, in addition to employing another 50
engineers through third-party vendors such as Wipro.
Like other Silicon Valley companies, SanDisk has grown its presence in India in order to access
specialized technical talent for global growth and to be closer to evolving needs and trends in
one of its largest potential markets. Global cell phone and digital consumer device sales continue
to grow dramatically, and Indian consumers have been a particularly strong market for memory
devices to archive music, movies and personal photos.
In April 2008, SanDisk announced new distributor partnerships to take its retail reach beyond 15,000
storefronts in major cities. It signed with Ingram Micro to sell camera and phone flash memory cards
through 70 vendors in 28 Indian states, reaching an estimated 12,000 retail customers.
Indian entrepreneur Rajeev Madhavan founded Cupertino-based electronic design automation
(EDA) developer Magma Design Automation in 1997. Madhavan began his
career with Bell North Research (BNR), an R&D unit of Nortel Networks, in Ottawa,
where he began writing his own EDA tools to help with design projects. In 1991, he transferred
to Silicon Valley to work for Cadence Design Systems as a BNR engineer.
In 1992, Madhavan jumped from Cadence, to join with Vinod Agarwal (now at SemIndia) and
Michael Howells in co-founding LogicVision. He jumped again in 1994, to found Ambit Design
Systems with $750,000 from a group of angel investors, this time making synthesis tools to
compete directly with Synopsys. Cadence bought Ambit in 1998 for $260 million, but by then
Madhavan had already left and raised $2.5 million from another group of angels—most notably
Sun co-founder and Cisco senior executive Andy Bechtolsheim—to launch Magma. At that
point Madhavan was 31 years old.
Magma had, by 2003, grown organically and through acquisitions to be the fourth largest EDA
software developer, behind Cadence, Synopsys and Oregon-based Mentor Graphics. The same
year, Wipro Ltd. licensed the company’s Blast Fusion integrated tool suite for use in its systemon-a-chip
(SoC) designs. KPIT Cummins followed suit in 2005. Many of Magma’s established
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