The US-based Xilinx Inc, world leader in the supply of programmable chips, sees that its Indian Development Centre (IDC) in Hyderabad will become the major research & development, engineering design and development base for its worldwide operations.

The Indian DC, which successfully rolled out 12 Intellectual Property (IP) cores in its first year of operations, is expected to play a major role and will witness flows of future R&D design and development works in the years to come, said William P Roelandts, Chairman, President and CEO of Xilinx Inc.

Addressing press persons here on Thursday, Mr Roelandts said: "We are overwhelmed by our Indian DC's achievements in its first year of operations and believe that the IDC will become a major player in the areas of engineering, design and development over the years."

The 12 IP cores are off-the-shelf, pre-defined hardware design modules that Xilinx customers can use to reduce their design efforts, lower total costs, increase performance and get to market faster. The IP cores, developed by the Xilinx worldwide customer base of over 7,500 companies with several hundred thousand design engineers generating 50, 000 design starts annually.

These cores are suitable for telecommunications, consumer electronics and automotive applications, Mr Roelandts said.

According to him, the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip design technologies are expected to overtake the traditional ASIC chip technologies and the ratio will change more in favour of our FPGA technologies because these technologies will take away the market share of ASIC.

According to Akshaya Prakash, managing director of XIDC, " Our successful start is a direct result of the commitment from both Xilinx and CMC to develop a pool of local semi-conductor R&D talent, thereby contributing to the growth of the Indian IC industry. "Xilinx looks forward to work with CMC Ltd to grow the R&D talent and establish programmable chips as the preferred IC choice in India and around the world, he added.