When was xilinx founded

The flexibility was just what customers wanted. While FPGAs first took root in telecommunications and networking, they were rapidly deployed in the automotive, consumer and industrial sectors. Floyd was a respected semiconductor veteran who had been on the founding team of National Semiconductor and, prior to joining Kleiner Perkins, had been executive vice president of sales and marketing for Apple.

Floyd had the perfect background to help this young company get off the ground. Bernie, now CEO of Xilinx, at 62 was the oldest founder we had ever backed, but he was an exceptional businessman full of energy and with a keen intellect. Ross and James brought technical genius to Xilinx, but the company needed to build out a leadership team quickly. Xilinx delivers the most dynamic processing technology in the industry, enabling rapid innovation with its adaptable, intelligent computing.

At its core, adaptive computing comprises silicon hardware that can be highly optimized for specific applications. This optimization occurs after the hardware is manufactured and can be repeated an almost infinite number of times. Learn more about Adaptive Computing. You are using a deprecated Browser. Such a holdup could cost millions of dollars if an entire project was stalled while waiting for the new semiconductor.

Freeman realized that there might be a better way of meeting the need for application-specific circuits. His idea was to develop a sort of blank computer chip that could be programmed by the customer, thus minimizing risks associated with faulty chips and allowing much greater flexibility for companies designing equipment that incorporated the chips.

The technology became known as "field programmable gate array," or FPGA. Freeman, who was a vice-president and general manager at Zilog at the time, approached his superiors and suggested that the development of FPGA devices could be a viable new avenue for Zilog. Confident of the practicality of his concept, Freeman left his post at Zilog and began developing the first FPGA chip. He joined forces with another Zilog expatriate, Bernard Vonderschmitt. The year-old Vonderschmitt also had been working as a vice-president and general manager at Zilog.

Prior to that he had served 20 years at RCA, where he had headed the solid-state division. Their combined brainpower and management experience allowed them to attract several million dollars of venture capital, which they used to design the first commercially viable field programmable gate array. In they incorporated the venture as Xilinx, and in November of they began selling their first product. The company's system basically consisted of an off-the-shelf programmable chip and a software package that could be used to program and tailor the chip for specific needs.

The technology was based on the arrangement of gates the lowest level building block in a logic circuit in complex formations called arrays; as the number of gates increased, the more complex were the functions that the semiconductor could perform. The advantage of Xilinx's system was that the software allowed the customer to program the gates and arrays, in a manner analogous to a connect-the-dots puzzle, to perform any number of different functions.

Also integral to the success of the system was a small family of advanced standard semiconductors, which were manufactured for Xilinx under license by Seiko Epson in Japan. Xilinx's FPGA systems ultimately lived up to Freeman's original vision, providing greater flexibility for equipment manufacturers and minimizing problems caused by traditional chip manufacturing methods.

The company's first products offered less complexity i. As Xilinx was earning respect for its FPGA technology, the market for application-specific circuits continued to grow during the late s and into the s.

The result was that the market for FPGA chips surged, contributing to rapid revenue and profit growth at Xilinx. Unfortunately, Freeman died in Vonderschmitt took the reins as president and chief executive. Xilinx was aided during the late s by a partnership with Monolithic Memories Inc.