Nippon Digital Equipment Corp is to get DEC’s third major research laboratory to complement the ones in the US and the UK. The Japanese laboratory will be built in a new business park in Yokohama, and construction is due to start in October. The mission for the new unit will be design of integrated circuits, and, significantly, disk and other storage devices, the area in which DEC lags IBM most seriously. It will also produce Japanese versions of international software. DEC currently has about 160 research staff in three locations around Tokyo and in Chiba, where the company has its VAX assembly plant.