Xilinx Inc to step up operations in India

Creates 12 intellectual property cores at its Hyderabad centre

Xilinx Inc, a US-based supplier of programmable chips that has an Indian development centre (IDC) operated by CMC in Hyderabad, has created 12 intellectual property (IP) cores in its first year of operation in Hyderabad.

IP cores are pre-defined hardware design modules that customers can use to reduce their design efforts, lower total costs and perform a specific function. The company is now looking at expanding its Indian operations in the coming years.

Addressing a press conference, Akshya Prakash, managing director of Xilinx-CMC India Development Centre, said, "We have successfully created 12 IP cores at our Hyderabad centre that are being used by the Indian and global markets."

The IDC currently has 30 R&D engineers, and according to Willem P Roelandts, president, CEO and chairman of Xilinx, the company is looking at increasing this number to 300 in the future.

At the company's IDC in Hyderabad, the staff covers the entire product development cycle of programmable chips which includes design, verification and testing.

It produces programmable chips that are not only used in consumer electronics and aerospace industry but also in the defence services for digital signal processing.

In India, some of its customers include Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) and Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).

On the trends in the semi-conductor industry, Roelandts said, "Today there is enough space for both Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). In future, however, there is likely to be more designing in the FPGA domain."

"FPGAs will take over the market share of ASICs in the near future as FPGAs have the flexibility of changing functions as per the needs and cost less as well," Prakash said.

"India is not a good market for programmable logic devices but is a good place for designing because of abundance of talent. Hence, we are in a build-up mode in India and are not likely to spin-off our Indian operations as a separate company," Roelandts said.

There is, however, an option for acquisition in India. We may look at acquiring a company for its technology and know-how in this sector, he added.

San Jose-based Xilinx spends 17 per cent of its revenues on R&D and employs over 1,000 R&D engineers worldwide. It creates 50,000 designs every year and has 200 IP cores to its credit.

Xilinx's turnover for the third quarter of current fiscal was $355 million and net income was $64 million. The company has operating facilities in Colorado, New Mexico, Ireland and Scotland, and has around 7,500 customers worldwide.