Xilinx

Xilinx, Inc. (/ˈzaɪlɪŋks/ ZY-lingks) is an American technology company, primarily a supplier of programmable logic devices. It is known for inventing the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and as the first semiconductor company with a fabless manufacturing model.

Founded in Silicon Valley in 1984, the company is headquartered in San Jose, California, with additional offices in Longmont, Colorado; Dublin, Ireland; Singapore; Hyderabad, India; Beijing, China; Shanghai, China; Brisbane, Australia and Tokyo, Japan.

Major FPGA product families include Virtex (high-performance), Kintex (mid-range) and Artix (low-cost), and the retired Spartan (low-cost) series. Major computer software includes Xilinx ISE and Vivado Design Suite.

History

Early days

Ross Freeman, Bernard Vonderschmitt, and James V Barnett II, who all had worked for integrated circuit and solid-state device manufacturer Zilog Corp, founded Xilinx in 1984.

While working for Zilog, Freeman wanted to create chips that acted like a blank tape, allowing users to program the technology themselves. At the time, the concept was paradigm-changing. "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, who when hired in 1984 as the first IC designer was Xilinx's eighth employee.