Xilinx eyes wireless communications mkt in India

California-based Xilinx Inc, a player in the programmable logic devices (PLD) market, sees future growth opportunities in the wireless communications market in India, particularly in the areas of Wimax and IPTV.

The $2-billion company has already tied up with companies that use its programmable chips to develop technology for equipment and implement wimax networks. With a few others, it is in various stages of discussion. So far, the company has been catering to wireline communications, aerospace and defence, and industrial and medical verticals in the country.

"We are targeting the booming wireless communication and networking market in India. Though IPTV technology is in its initial stage in the country, India is expected to be the fastest-growing markets for this technology and we see growth opportunities in this arena too, in one or two years down the line," Krishna Rangasayee, senior director (vertical markets and partnerships), Xilinx Inc, said here on Thursday.

Xilinx is currently in the process of developing its Hyderabad centre, its largest facility outside the US, into a global R&D hub. As part of this, it is now building a systems and applications development, and customer support teams, according to Mallik Moturi, managing director, Xilinx India.

Thus far, the Hyderabad centre has developed 60 full product development lifecycle of intellectual property (IP) cores including gigabit ethernet, networking, automotive and process-related cores.

"The Hyderabad centre currently employs about 100 high-end design engineers and we plan to increase the strength of the R&D manpower here to 300 in the next couple of years," Moturi said.

On the company's $75-million Asia Pacific venture capital fund, which was designed to seek opportunities to invest in companies in the Asia region including India, Rangasayee said Xilinx was planning to invest in companies that are creating innovative applications based on programmable logic.

Investment opportunities are all there and Xilinx is currently evaluating a couple of them. It will take a year or so to finalise the investments, he said.

"Each potential investment would be between $5 million and $10 million. The objective of the fund is to enable companies to be successful in creating innovative applications, and hence we will not take a controlling stake in the companies that we invest in," he added.