BANGALORE, India Altera Corp. may be the only FPGA company to have a wholly-owned Indian subsidiary firm, but it has no plans to set up a R & D center or outsource software development to India. Altera (San Jose, Calif.) recently tied up with the government-owned Center for Development of Telematics (C-DoT) under the Altera Consultant Alliance Program, enabling C-DoT leverage its IP and system design capability across global customers. It does not plan to enroll any company here under its Megacore Partners Program as it believes the IP companies in India need to develop their infrastructure to support global customers. Instead, Altera is looking at increasing the footprint of its customers in India and bolstering the number of design labs from the three it now has here. It is also looking to increase the number of institutes from the hundred or so it presently has under its university program. "In our view, having a R & D center or outsourcing software development in India does not benefit the Indian design market. We want to help indigenous companies here and offer higher support, apart from increasing our presence in research institutes," said Ben Lee, vice president of Altera. "While we are always evaluating the potential, we have no plans for R & D in India. We are adding to the R & D centers we have in other parts of the world," Lee added. Altera’s main FPGA vendor, Xilinx Inc., does not have a subsidiary company in India. But Xilinx has a tie-up with CMC Ltd, which has been performing R & D work for it the last few years in Hyderabad. |