Xilinx

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Xilinx

Type of Company	Public (NASDAQ: XLNX)
Founded	1984, public since 1990
Headquarters	San Jose, CA
Key people	Ross Freeman, Bernie Vonderschmitt
Industry	Integrated Circuits
Products	FPGAs, CPLDs
Revenue	~$1.6 billion/year
Employees	3,050
Website	www.xilinx.com

Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) is the world's largest developer and fabless manufacturer of a class of reconfigurable hardware chips known as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). It was founded by Ross Freeman (FPGA inventor), Bernie Vonderschmitt (fabless pioneer), and Jim Barnett in 1984 and was based in Silicon Valley. Today, their HQ resides in San Jose, California; the European HQ is based in Dublin, Ireland and the Asia Pacific/Japan HQ is based in Singapore. It also has offices in Austin, Texas; Longmont, Colorado; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Toronto, Canada and Hyderabad, Bangalore, India.

1 Technologies
2 Family Lines
3 Competition
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Technologies

Xilinx is a developer of FPGA and CPLD devices that are used in numerous applications within telecommunications, automotive, consumer, defense, and other fields. Xilinx offers device families for glue logic (CoolRunner, CoolRunner II), low-cost (Spartan), and high-end (Virtex) applications in addition to supporting devices such as PROMs.

The Virtex-II Pro, Virtex-4, and Virtex-5 FPGA families are of particular interest to system-on-a-chip (SoC) designers because they can include up to two embedded IBM PowerPC cores^[1],^[2]. These designs are capable of running a regular embedded OS such as Linux and interfacing with custom Hardware Description Language (HDL) logic implemented in the surrounding fabric.

Xilinx develops IP cores designed in HDL which allow designers to minimize time to market. These cores range from simple functions (such as BCD encoders, counters, etc.) to complex systems (such as multi-gigabit networking cores and custom embedded microcontrollers like the fully-featured Microblaze soft microprocessor, and the compact Picoblaze microcontroller.) In addition, Xilinx Design Services (XDS) can create custom cores for a fee.

Xilinx offers electronic design automation (EDA) tools for use with its devices. Chief among these is ISE, which offers a complete EDA flow. The other is Xilinx's Embedded Developer's Kit (EDK), which is aimed primarily at designers wishing to use the embedded PowerPC 405 core in the Virtex-II Pro and Virtex-4, or Xilinx's own soft microprocessor/microcontroller in their designs. Other domain-specific tools include System Generator for DSP, which provides seamless simulation and implementation of high-performance DSP designs on Xilinx's FPGAs.