FPGAs to dominate semi-conductor design market

BANGALORE: “Field Programmable Gateway Arrays (FPGAs) have come a long way from being used for prototyping purposes to now being at the heart of embedded systems, “ said Ivo Bolsens, CTO, US-based Xilinx Inc.

Xilinx is the world's biggest manufacturer of Programmable Logic Devices (PLD), which are vital to chip design. The $1.6 billion company occupies a market leading 51.5 percent share of the FPGA/PLD market.

Bolsens said that the company was growing consistently and was gaining market share at the expense of the traditional gateway/ ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) market. FPGAs are emerging as a good alternative to ASIC owing to low-cost, ability to handle high-speed applications, complexity, and flexibility. Makers of telecom communication equipment and consumer devices like HDTV and plasma displays, form the main customer segments for the company.

The Indian market is of considerable interest to Xilinx, thanks to the indirect impact from Indian semi-conductor designers. “They have an authority on the kind of tools and design decisions which makes it important for us to engage them. We partner with manufacturers, EDA tools providers, sales channels and also universities to promote the ecosystem,” Bolsens said.

Besides engaging the market, the company also has an engineering presence in India through its tie-up with Tata subsidiary CMC Ltd. Xilinx's dedicated 35-member team at CMC, Hyderabad, was responsible for developing 12 IP cores for the company last year.

Spurred by the success of its outsourcing exercise, the company intends to ramp up the team size to 300 in a couple of years.