Description
Xilinx, Inc. is an American technology company that is primarily a supplier of programmable logic devices. The company invented the field-programmable gate array (FPGA). It is the semiconductor company that created the first fabless manufacturing model.
Co-founded by Ross Freeman, Bernard Vonderschmitt, and James V Barnett II in 1984, the company went public on the NASDAQ in 1989.
AMD announced its acquisition of Xilinx in October 2020.
Company overview
Xilinx was founded in Silicon Valley in 1984 and headquartered in San Jose, USA, with additional offices in Longmont, USA; Dublin, Ireland; Singapore; Hyderabad, India; Beijing, China; Shanghai, China; Brisbane, Australia and Tokyo, Japan.
According to Bill Carter, a fellow at Xilinx, the choice of the name Xilinx refers to the chemical symbol for silicon Si. The 'X's at each end represent programmable logic blocks. The "linx" represents programmable links that connect the logic blocks together.
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 Intel) is Xilinx's strongest competitor with 34% of the market. Other key players in this market are Actel (now Microsemi), and Lattice Semiconductor.
