Bangalore, India: Xilinx Inc. said it is in talks with leading universities in India to initiate joint research and development likely to start later this year.

Xilinx (San Jose, Calif.) has already taken the first step by starting a university program at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay where it has set up an FPGA lab, according to Richard Sevcik, executive vice president of programmable logic solutions.

Sevcik added some news reports stating that existing research and development being done with CMC Ltd in the south Indian city of Hyderabad would be spun off into a separate company were baseless. Instead, Xilinx plans to expand its operations with CMC.

CMC runs a center dedicated to developing solutions for Xilinx and since this was initiated a year ago, about a dozen IP blocks have been shipped. This center will be the Xilinx design hub in the Asia Pacific region and will also conduct development of software that can be programmed on to FPGAs.

Indian companies hoping to lower product development cost are now opting to use FPGAs, increasing market opportunities for Xilinx. The CMC center will expand into more research areas for Xilinx, noted Akshya Prakash, head of the Xilinx-CMC project at CMC Ltd.

"This model, a joint effort of Xilinx and CMC, has shown good results in a year," said Prakash. "Companies that choose to go it alone take a much longer time to show results," he added