Renesas to take chip design to Vietnam

Renesas will establish a system large-scale integrated circuit chip design centre in Vietnam in October.

Renesas Design Viet Nam (RVC), which will operate the centre, will help design chips such as Renesas' SH-Mobile processor, an application processor that handles voice, image and other applications inside mobile phones.

Japan-based Renesas said the centre will help it develop chips more quickly.

President of the new company has yet to be named, Renesas said.

RVC will be capitalised at $4m (£2.2m). The company will initially be staffed with about 20 to 30 engineers in 2004.

Renesas said that RVC will expand its business to designing other system-on-chip products and software and will increase the number of engineers to about 200 in 2006 and about 1,000 in 2010.

Paul Kallender writes for IDG News Service