Xilinx, the former glory of FPGA

Xilinx, once a giant in the FPGA industry, has now been acquired by AMD, but its story and the experiences of its three founders are worth reading.

FPGA, field programmable gate array, is simply to imagine a multifunctional Lego board on which you can freely combine blocks of various shapes. FPGA is like this Lego board, it is a flexible chip, you can arrange various electronic blocks on it through programming to build your own electronic products.

In the 1960s , integrated circuit technology began to develop rapidly, and thousands of transistors were combined on a small chip to realize complex digital circuits. In the 1970s , programmable logic devices (PLDs) appeared, and customizable digital circuits began to appear. In the 1980s , Ross Freeman , the founder of the famous Xilinx , first proposed the concept of FPGA. Compared with traditional PLDs, FPGAs are more flexible and larger in scale.

The "Xi" in the name Xilinx refers to the chemical symbol Si for silicon . The " linx " stands for the programmable links that connect programmable logic blocks together. The " X "s at both ends represent programmable logic blocks. The idea behind this is programmable logic -- engineers can tweak the chip to suit their own purposes.

During this period, Xilinx launched the Virtex, Virtex-II, Virtex-II Pro and Virtex-4 series of FPGAs. The launch of this series marked Xilinx's entry into the high-end field in the FPGA market, providing programmable logic devices with larger capacity and higher performance.

In recent years, as some application areas have begun to tend to more specialized hardware, such as ASICs and GPUs, part of the FPGA market has been squeezed. In 2015, Intel announced the acquisition of Altera, which controls half of the programmable device and FPGA market. As a result, the only remaining seedling in the FPGA track is Xilinx. Xilinx was also acquired by AMD in 2022 for a transaction amount of US$35 billion, which caused a sensation as the largest semiconductor merger and acquisition case in history.

Thus, the history of Xilinx came to an end.