California-based Xilinx Inc, the world’s largest supplier of programmable logic solutions, is eyeing China’s market for field-programmable gate array (FPGA) for its future growth, a company executive said in an interview with the Global Times.

FPGAs are a kind of programmable-logic device used in equipment from satellites to televisions to cars, enabling flexible designs in different applications, as opposed to traditional application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC), which are designed for only one application.

The use of FPGAs has become very popular in China, as it helps save money on investment costs in application-specific platforms.

”China is one of our greatest potential growth markets,” Vincent Tong, executive director for Asia-Pacific at Xilinx, told the Global Times.

As the market becomes more fractured and companies almost cannot simply supply one specific product anymore, people will turn more and more to FPGA technology, Tong said, noting that FPGA has great potential to be applied in industrial surveillance and medical equipment areas in China.

The Chinese market, the biggest market for Xilinx in the Asia-Pacific region, has seen rising revenue over the past several years, according to Devadas Varma, senior director of Xilinx, who didn’t give exact figures.

The company aims to raise its revenue to $3 billion by 2015, with ”the China market playing a key role in making that happen,” he said.

Xilinx accounts for more than half of the global market for programmable logic devices in 2010 in terms of sales, according to market research firm US-based iSuppli.

To expand its foothold in China, the company announced its first China R&D arm in December, focused on software-related design activities, as part of the company’s Programmable Platforms Development group.

The rise in popularity of FPGA has also lured chip giant Intel Corp into the market. Since November 2010, Intel has partnered with California-based Altera, Xilinx’s closest rival, to offer a version of its low-cost, low-power Atom microprocessors for netbooks and other affordable personal computers.

”Xilinx and Intel are in two very different areas and we see this as little concern to us,” Tong said.

”Overlap is small and not of consequence [to us],” he noted.

Responding to market rumors that Intel may consider acquiring leading FPGA suppliers to further cash in on the marketplace for FPGA, Tong remarked that ”Xilinx knows its focus and what it is doing, so we don’t want to speculate about what other companies are doing.”