Intel Malaysia celebrates 20 years of innovation at Penang Design Center

Intel Malaysia’s Penang Design Center continues to deliver high value design and development work for a multitude of chipsets and microprocessors

Penang, Sept. 30, 2011 – Intel Malaysia is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its Penang Design Center (PDC) this year. Established in 1991 with a core staff of about 30 engineers, the PDC is today one of the premier design centers for Intel Corporation with over 1,000 engineers – about 90 percent of them being Malaysians.

The PDC initially started with cost reduction projects in the early years but, over a span of two decades, has transformed into a full blown award-winning design center with a wide range of responsibilities. Some areas that the PDC is involved in include advanced silicon design, package design, validation, product development, and customer enablement for central processing units (CPUs) and chipsets and System-On-Chip (SOC) in the mainstream client segments as well as in the low cost and low power processors segment.

The PDC, which is now an organization under the Intel Architecture Group, is also the single largest advanced silicon design and development organization in Southeast Asia with over RM1 billion invested in research and development to date. Given its strategic location in the region, the PDC also provides technical support to key PC manufacturers in Asia Pacific.

“Intel continues to elevate Malaysia’s position in the global economic value chain by training thousands of Malaysians to become highly skilled knowledge workers. The many successes that the Penang Design Center has achieved over 20 years is a testament of Intel’s commitment to drive Malaysia to embrace a high income economy by shifting the country’s competitiveness based on low cost labor to high technology services sectors,” said Robin Martin, Managing Director of Intel Malaysia.

Key milestones at the PDC
Over the last two decades, the PDC has achieved many innovation milestones. The most recent achievement was the PDC’s key role in delivering state of the art Intel architecture silicon products such as the latest Intel® Core™ i7 processor, the Intel® Atom™ processor for nettops and netbooks, as well as supporting chipsets.
Other key milestones and highlights for PDC include:
• Designing the new 8-bit/16-bit microcontrollers (early 1990s - 1994)
• Winning the Intel Perfect Design Quality (PDQ2) Award (1999 – 2000)
• Developing the I/O Controller Hub 4 (ICH4) that supports Intel® Centrino™ (2001-2002)
• Delivering the highest performance integrated USB2.0 chipset (2002)
• Delivering the ICH4M chipset for the Intel® Centrino platform (2003)
• Garnering the PC Magazine Technical Excellence Award for PC Components (2004)
• Full design ownership for Intel® CoreTM 2 Solo codename Millville (2005 – 2006)
• Contributing significantly to the design and validation of the 1st Generation Intel® Core processor family microarchitecture codename Nehalem (2008)
• Part of the global team that garnered the 2010 EE Times ACE “Design Team of the Year” Award and the prestigious Intel Quality Award for 2010
• Delivering the chipset for the 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ processor family platform codename Cougar Point. (2010)