Besides VC investment, the leading chipmaker is also keen on complete buyouts in India, according to Intel's south Asia director Avtar Saini.It is also considering an increase in its direct investment in India. Its research and development center which came up last summer in Bangalore presently has 60 software engineers and 35 in hardware. This is likely to be doubled, according to Saini.

``We plan to grow both software and hardware R&D to make it a world-class center. We have had a 10-fold growth in business from India in the last five years, registering between 40 to 50 per cent annual growth rate and this year should see India figuring prominently in Intel Corporation's scheme of things,'' said outgoing director Atul Vijaykar, who will relocate to USA at the end of next month.

Intel had announced investments in 12 Indian companies last year for an undisclosed sum and emerged among the largest technology investors after such a strategy was announced by the company's CEO Craig Barret in October 1998. Worldwide, Intel spent $6 billion on acquisitions and $1 billion in VC investments last year.

It had invested last year in companies like Rediff, Network Solutions, Eastern Software Systems, Silicon Automation Systems, Ritechoice, Indus Software and Bharti TeleSpatial.

``We are keen to make investments in the companies working on developing the content for Internet, or in computing and product development in general, or those building infrastructure for data communication or telecom in general. But the focus will be clearly deriving a synergistic value in a global context,'' Saini elaborated on the VC strategy.

Outlining Intel's India gameplan, Saini said three broad areas had been identified by the company which were market development, engineering development and strategic programmes.

Vijayekar also revealed that the giant chipmaker was all set to launch its first 1 gigahertz microprocessor ``within a few days'' to succeed its existing top-end Pentium-III 800 chip. In addition, it is set to launch two new 32-bit family of processors. The much-awaited IA-64 architecture Itanium chip, targetting the server segments, will unveil in the second half of the year, he added.