Xilinx picks Hyderabad as Asia-Pacific design hub
The Financial Express , January 4, 2005

Xilinx, the US-based semiconductor major, has made India the Asia-Pacific hub for its design activities in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), a logic that goes into chips forming the heart of digital devices like digital cameras and mobile phones. An FPGA platform creates programmable design chip as against ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) platform where the program is fixed and cannot be changed once the chip is developed.

The $1.6 billion Xilinx, in association with Tata controlled CMC Ltd, has created a design development centre in Hyderabad where CMC will provide the manpower and infrastructure to develop designs that go into a System on Chip (SoC). Akshya Prakash, managing director of Xilinx operations in India, and R Ramanan, managing director and the chief executive officer of CMC, did not disclose the investment that went to develop the centre.

The reason for Xilinx to be in India is the presence of global players in the Indian market as well as the availability of high calibre engineers. “We want to be close to our customers and India is the best place. Global IT players like HP, Cisco and LG are doing a major part of their SoC design activities in India,” said Mr Prakash. The development centre in Hyderabad will grow to more than 300 designers, said Mr Richard W Sevcik, the executive vice-president of Xilink.

Some of the Xilinx customers are global telecom equipment vendors, mobile phone and digital camera manufacturers. Mobile phones, digital cameras and base station equipment of Ericsson need SoC to drive various applications. Mr Sevcik believes that FPGA-based SoCs have a bright future. Digital devices like cameras use FPGA chips. “The development cost of chips on ASIC platforms starts with $5 million and requires a long time, as against $20,000 for a FPGA chip which can be developed faster.”