Japan's Elpida Memory and its Taiwan subsidiary Rexchip Electronics announced on January 5 that they will set up an R&D center in Taiwan for the development of advanced memory chip technologies, Taiwan's Economic Daily News reported. The new R&D center will be located in Rexchip's base in the Central Taiwan Science Park. It is estimated that an initial investment of US$50 million to US$80 million will be injected into the project over the first two years. An R&D team of around 80 will be formed by Rexchip and its two parent companies Elpida and Powerchip Semiconductor. The R&D center is expected to begin operations in the first quarter of 2010 and focus on the development of 40nm and smaller DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) technologies.