Xilinx
Xilinx, Inc. (/ˈzaɪlɪŋks/ ZY-links) 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). It also created the first fabless manufacturing model.[4][5][6]
Xilinx was co-founded by Ross Freeman, Bernard Vonderschmitt, and James V Barnett II in 1984. The company went public on the NASDAQ in 1990.[7][8] 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.[9][10] 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.[11]
Company overview[edit]
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, Tokyo, Japan and Yerevan, Armenia.[12][13]
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.[14] The "linx" represents programmable links that connect programmable logic blocks together. The 'X's at each end represent the programmable logic blocks.[15]
Xilinx sells a broad range of FPGAs, complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs), design tools, intellectual property, and reference designs.[16] Xilinx customers represent just over half of the entire programmable logic market, at 51%.[16][5][17] 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.[6]
History[edit]
Early history[edit]
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.[12][15]
While working for Zilog, Freeman wanted to create chips that acted like a blank tape, allowing users to program the technology themselves.[15] "The concept required lots of transistors and, at that time, transistors were considered extremely precious—people thought that Ross's idea was pretty far out", said Xilinx Fellow Bill Carter, hired in 1984 to design ICs as Xilinx's eighth employee.[15]
It was at the time more profitable to manufacture generic circuits in massive volumes[12] than specialized circuits for specific markets.[12] FPGAs promised to make specialized circuits profitable.
Freeman could not convince Zilog to invest in FPGAs to chase a market then estimated at $100 million,[12] so he and Barnett left to team up with Vonderschmitt, a former colleague. Together, they raised $4.5 million in venture funding to design the first commercially viable FPGA.[12] They incorporated the company in 1984 and began selling its first product by 1985.[12]
By late 1987, the company had raised more than $18 million in venture capital (equivalent to $48.27 million in 2023) and was making nearly $14 million a year.[12][18]
Expansion[edit]
From 1988 to 1990, the company's revenue grew each year, from $30 million to $100 million.[12] During this time, Monolithic Memories Inc. (MMI), the company which had been providing funding to Xilinx, was purchased by AMD.[12] As a result, Xilinx dissolved the deal with MMI and went public on the NASDAQ in 1989.[12] The company also moved to a 144,000-square-foot (13,400 m2) plant in San Jose, California, to handle increasingly large orders from HP, Apple Inc., IBM and Sun Microsystems.[12]
Other FPGA makers emerged in the mid-1990s.[12] By 1995, the company reached $550 million in revenue.[12] Over the years, Xilinx expanded operations to India, Asia and Europe.[19][20][21][22]
Xilinx's sales rose to $2.53 billion by the end of its fiscal year 2018.[23] Moshe Gavrielov – an EDA and ASIC industry veteran who was appointed president and CEO in early 2008 – introduced targeted design platforms that combine FPGAs with software, IP cores, boards and kits to address focused target applications.[24] These platforms provide an alternative to costly application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and application-specific standard products (ASSPs).[25][26][27]
On January 4, 2018, Victor Peng, the company's COO, replaced Gavrielov as CEO.[28]