US-BASED Xilinx, a leading supplier of programmable logic solutions, plans to bring more development work to its India centre in Hyderabad. The company is betting big on automotive, aerospace & defence and consumer electronics as major growth areas.

The Indian facility with an automotive competency centre will play a major role in the development of new solutions in the segment. “Initially, the Hyderabad centre was engaged in IP development. But, now it focuses on system solutions for the telecom, aerospace and automotive sectors. We are also planning to increase our headcount from 100 to 300 in India in two years,” said Ivo Bolsens, vice-president & chief technology officer of Xilinx.

Xilinx will also bring new incubation technologies such as software design tools to India.

In 2006, consumer electronics and automotive segment contributed 16% of the company’s revenues while aerospace & defence contributed 10%. Telecom was its largest vertical and accounted for around 46% of its total revenues.

The company is also likely to release 45-nm field programmable gate arrays (FPGA), a type of logic chip that can be programmed, this year and the Hyderabad centre will be involved in its development.

Besides, the company also has a $75-million venture capital fund for Asia Pacific to encourage innovation and technology. “Our aim is to infuse capital in companies, which focus on technology that can be used in FPGA. In fact, we are in talks with a hardware services company in the country, where we are looking at investing about $5 million to $10 million along with other VCs,” he said.

Globally, the FPGA market is estimated to be at $4 billion and is estimated to touch $5 billion by 2010. The $2-billion Xilinx has around 55% share of this market. Despite predictions of slowdown in the global semiconductor industry, the company expects it revenues to grow from 9% to about 15% in 2008.