Xilinx

Xilinx, Inc. (ˈzaɪlɪŋks ) was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company is known for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and creating the first fabless manufacturing model. Xilinx was co-founded by Ross Freeman, Bernard Vonderschmitt, and James V Barnett II in the year 1984 and the company went public on the NASDAQ in the year 1990. AMD announced its acquisition of Xilinx in October 2020 and the deal was completed on February 14, 2022, through an all-stock transaction worth an estimated $60 billion. Xilinx remained a wholly owned subsidiary of AMD until the brand was phased out in June 2023, with Xilinx's product lines now branded under AMD. Xilinx was founded in Silicon Valley in 1984 and is headquartered in San Jose, United States, with additional offices in Longmont, United States; Dublin, Ireland; Singapore; Hyderabad, India; Beijing, China; Shanghai, China; Brisbane, Australia and Tokyo, Japan. According to Bill Carter, former CTO and current fellow at Xilinx, the choice of the name Xilinx refers to the chemical symbol for silicon Si. The "linx" represents programmable links that connect programmable logic blocks together. The 'X's at each end represent the programmable logic blocks. Xilinx sells a broad range of FPGAs, complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs), design tools, intellectual property and reference designs. Xilinx customers represent just over half of the entire programmable logic market, at 51%. Altera (now subsidiary of Intel) is Xilinx's strongest competitor with 34% of the market. Other key players in this market are Actel (now subsidiary of Microsemi), and Lattice Semiconductor. Ross Freeman, Bernard Vonderschmitt, and James V Barnett II—all former employees of Zilog, an integrated circuit and solid-state device manufacturer—co-founded Xilinx in 1984 with headquarters in San Jose, USA. While working for Zilog, Freeman wanted to create chips that acted like a blank tape, allowing users to program the technology themselves.