Hyderabad: San Jose based Xilinx, the fourth largest ASIC company in the world intends to expand the activities in the India development center in Hyderabad. Xilinx had partnered with CMC Ltd in February 2004 to set up a design center in the Asia Pacific region. It also becomes the only design center for the company outside the US.

"Presently we have around 30 professionals working from the CMC premises in Hyderabad. We are planning to increase this number to 100 by the end of 2005 and to 200 by 2006. It is not any offshore development kind of activity that's being done from here, but crucial design activity is being taken up in verticals like consumer electronics, automotive industry, semiconductors and so on," informed Xilinx-CMC India Development Center, Managing Director, Akshya Prakash.

Elaborating on the Indian activities, he said, "We are presently working on the Intellectual Property Cores that are predefined blocks of functionality that allows the customers to program the chips and perform custom logic operations."

The $1.40 billion company is the leader in Programmable Logic Devices (PLDs), which is one of the fastest growing segments of the semiconductor industry. It enjoys a 60 percent market share in the $ three billion PLD market. As per Gartner Dataquest forecasts, the PLD market is set to grow to $6.3 billion in 2008. "Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) which are a category in PLDs are becoming popular while the ASICs are becoming more and more expensive. The lesser time taken to design and the lower costs of FPGAs are driving the business and would surely overtake the ASIC market over a period of time. We at Xilinx, enjoying 60 percent market share, are quick enough to roll out more and more products using this technology," said Xilinx programmable logic solutions EVP Richard W Sevcik.

"As we see the consumer electronics is the fast moving areas in India, we foresee a 40 percent growth in the market from Asia Pacific and Japan. Besides having development activities we are also working on a strategy to market our products to the domestic customers in India over a period of time," he added.