Xilinx
More info
- Creator
- Ross Freeman, Bernard Vonderschmitt, James Barnett
- Released
- 1984
- Owner
- AMD (since 2022)
- Type
- Semiconductor company
Inventor of the FPGA — the chip you can rewire after it leaves the factory.
Ross Freeman bet that a chip full of configurable logic blocks and programmable interconnect would beat ordering a custom ASIC, because transistors were about to become essentially free. In 1985 the XC2064 shipped as the first commercial FPGA, with 64 logic blocks. Xilinx was also one of the first fabless chip companies: it designed in California and let someone else do the manufacturing.
The Spartan and Virtex families dominated for decades in a long duel with Altera. Zynq put ARM cores next to the programmable fabric on a single die. AMD closed its acquisition in 2022 for around $49 billion in stock, partly because Intel had bought Altera seven years earlier.