Xilinx
Xilinx, Inc. was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company is renowned for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array. It also pioneered the first fabless manufacturing model.
Xilinx was co-founded by Ross Freeman, Bernard Vonderschmitt, and James V Barnett II in 1984. The company went public on the Nasdaq in 1990. In October 2020, AMD announced its acquisition of Xilinx, which was completed on February 14, 2022, through an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $60 billion. Xilinx remained a wholly owned subsidiary of AMD until the brand was phased out in June 2023, with Xilinx's product lines now branded under AMD.
Company overview
Xilinx was founded in Silicon Valley in 1984 and was headquartered in San Jose, United States. The company also had offices in Longmont, Dublin, Singapore, Hyderabad, Beijing, Shanghai; Brisbane, Tokyo and Yerevan.According to Bill Carter, former CTO and fellow at Xilinx, the choice of the name Xilinx refers to the chemical symbol for silicon Si. The "linx" represents programmable links that connect programmable logic blocks together. The 'X's at each end represent the programmable logic blocks.
Xilinx sold a broad range of field programmable gate arrays, and complex programmable logic devices, design tools, intellectual property, and reference designs. Xilinx customers represent just over half of the entire programmable logic market, at 51%. Altera is Xilinx's strongest competitor with 34% of the market. Other key players in this market are Actel and Lattice Semiconductor.
History
Early history
, Bernard Vonderschmitt, and James V Barnett II—all former employees of Zilog, an integrated circuit and solid-state device manufacturer—co-founded Xilinx in 1984 with headquarters in San Jose, USA.While working for Zilog, Freeman wanted to create chips that acted like a blank tape, allowing users to program the technology themselves. "The concept required lots of transistors and, at that time, transistors were considered extremely precious—people thought that Ross's idea was pretty far out", said Xilinx Fellow Bill Carter, hired in 1984 to design ICs as Xilinx's eighth employee.
It was at the time more profitable to manufacture generic circuits in massive volumes than specialized circuits for specific markets. FPGAs promised to make specialized circuits profitable.
Freeman could not convince Zilog to invest in FPGAs to chase a market then estimated at $100 million, so he and Barnett left to team up with Vonderschmitt, a former colleague. Together, they raised $4.5 million in venture funding to design the first commercially viable FPGA. They incorporated the company in 1984 and began selling its first product by 1985.
By late 1987, the company had raised more than $18 million in venture capital and was making nearly $14 million a year.
Expansion
From 1988 to 1990, the company's revenue grew each year, from $30 million to $100 million. During this time, Monolithic Memories Inc., the company which had been providing funding to Xilinx, was purchased by AMD. As a result, Xilinx dissolved the deal with MMI and went public on the Nasdaq in 1989. The company also moved to a plant in San Jose, California, to handle increasingly large orders from HP, Apple Inc., IBM and Sun Microsystems.Other FPGA makers emerged in the mid-1990s. By 1995, the company reached $550 million in revenue. Over the years, Xilinx expanded operations to India, Asia and Europe.
Xilinx's sales rose to $2.53 billion by the end of its fiscal year 2018. Moshe Gavrielov – an EDA and ASIC industry veteran who was appointed president and CEO in early 2008 – introduced targeted design platforms that combine FPGAs with software, IP cores, boards and kits to address focused target applications. These platforms provide an alternative to costly application-specific integrated circuits and application-specific standard products.
On January 4, 2018, Victor Peng, the company's COO, replaced Gavrielov as CEO.
Recent history
In 2011, the company introduced the Virtex-7 2000T, the first product based on 2.5D stacked silicon to deliver larger FPGAs than could be built using standard monolithic silicon. Xilinx then adapted the technology to combine formerly separate components in a single chip, first combining an FPGA with transceivers based on heterogeneous process technology to boost bandwidth capacity while using less power.According to former Xilinx CEO Moshe Gavrielov, the addition of a heterogeneous communications device, combined with the introduction of new software tools and the Zynq-7000 line of 28 nm SoC devices that combine an ARM core with an FPGA, are part of shifting its position from a programmable logic device supplier to one delivering “all things programmable”.
In addition to Zynq-7000, Xilinx product lines include the Virtex, Kintex and Artix series, each including configurations and models optimized for different applications. In April 2012, the company introduced the Vivado Design Suite - a next-generation SoC-strength design environment for advanced electronic system designs. In May, 2014, the company shipped the first of the next generation FPGAs: the 20nm UltraScale.
In September 2017, Amazon and Xilinx started a campaign for FPGA adoption. This campaign enables AWS Marketplace's Amazon Machine Images with associated Amazon FPGA Instances created by partners. The two companies released software development tools to simplify the creation of FPGA technology. The tools create and manage the machine images created and sold by partners.
In July 2018, Xilinx acquired DeepPhi Technology, a Chinese machine learning startup founded in 2016. In October 2018, the Xilinx Virtex UltraScale+ FPGAs and NGCodec's H.265 video encoder were used in a cloud-based video coding service using the High Efficiency Video Coding. The combination enables video streaming with the same visual quality as that using GPUs, but at 35%-45% lower bitrate.
In November 2018, the company's Zynq UltraScale+ family of multiprocessor system-on-chips was certified to safety integrity level 3 HFT1 of the IEC 61508 specification. With this certification, developers are able to use the MPSoC platform in AI-based safety applications of up to SIL 3, in industrial 4.0 platforms of automotive, aerospace, and AI systems. In January 2019, ZF Friedrichshafen AG worked with Xilinx's Zynq to power its ProAI automotive control unit, which is used to enable automated driving applications. Xilinx's platform overlooks the aggregation, pre-processing, and distribution of real-time data, and accelerates the AI processing of the unit.
In November 2018, Xilinx migrated its defense-grade XQ UltraScale+ products to TSMC's 16 nm FinFET process. The products included the industry's first defense-grade heterogeneous multi-processor SoC devices and encompassed the XQ Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoCs and RFSoCs as well as XQ UltraScale+ Kintex and Virtex FPGAs. That same month the company expanded its Alveo data center accelerator cards portfolio with the Alveo U280. The initial Alveo line included the U200 and U250, which featured 16 nm UltraScale+ Virtex FPGAs and DDR4 SDRAM. Those two cards were launched in October 2018 at the Xilinx Developer Forum. At the Forum, Victor Peng, CEO of semiconductor design at Xilinx, and AMD CTO Mark Papermaster, used eight Alveo U250 cards and two AMD Epyc 7551 server CPUs to set a new world record for inference throughput at 30,000 images per second.
Also in November 2018, Xilinx announced that Dell EMC was the first server vendor to qualify its Alveo U200 accelerator card, used to accelerate key HPC and other workloads with select Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. The U280 included support for high-bandwidth memory and high-performance server interconnect. In August 2019, Xilinx launched the Alveo U50, a low-profile adaptable accelerator with PCIe Gen4 support. The U55C accelerator card was launched in November 2021, designed for HPCC and big data workloads by incorporating the RoCE v2-based clustering solution, allowing for FPGA-based HPCC clustering to be integrated into existing data center infrastructures.
In January 2019 K&L Gates, a law firm representing Xilinx sent a DMCA cease and desist letter to an EE YouTuber claiming trademark infringement for featuring the Xilinx logo next to Altera's in an educational video. Xilinx refused to reply until a video outlining the legal threat was published, after which they sent an apology e-mail.
In January 2019, Baidu announced that its new edge acceleration computing product, EdgeBoard, was powered by Xilinx. Edgeboard is a part of the Baidu Brain AI Hardware Platform Initiative, which encompasses Baidu's open computing services, and hardware and software products for its edge AI applications. Edgeboard is based on the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC, which uses real-time processors together with programmable logic. The Xilinx-based Edgeboard can be used to develop products like smart-video security surveillance solutions, advanced-driver-assistance systems, and next-generation robots.
In February 2019, the company announced two new generations of its Zynq UltraScale+ RF system on chip portfolio. The device covers the entire sub-6 GHz spectrum, which is necessary for 5G, and the updates included: an extended millimeter wave interface, up to 20% power reduction in the RF data converter subsystem compared to the base portfolio, and support of 5G New Radio. The second generation release covered up to 5 GHz, while the third went up to 6 GHz. As of February, the portfolio was the only adaptable radio platform single chip that had been designed to address the industry's 5G network needs. The second announcement revealed that Xilinx and Samsung Electronics performed the world's first 5G New Radio commercial deployment in South Korea. The two companies developed and deployed 5G massive multiple-input, multiple-output and millimeter wave products using Xilinx's UltraScale+ platform. The capabilities are essential for 5G commercialization. The companies also announced collaboration on Xilinx's Versal adaptable compute acceleration platform products that will deliver 5G services. In February 2019, Xilinx introduced an HDMI 2.1 IP subsystem core, which enabled the company's devices to transmit, receive, and process up to 8K UHD video in media players, cameras, monitors, LED walls, projectors, and kernel-based virtual machines.
In April 2019, Xilinx entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Solarflare Communications, Inc. Xilinx became a strategic investor in Solarflare in 2017. The companies have been collaborating since then on advanced networking technology, and in March 2019 demonstrated their first joint solution: a single-chip FPGA-based 100G NIC. The acquisition enables Xilinx to combine its FPGA, MPSoC and ACAP solutions with Solarflare's NIC technology. In August 2019, Xilinx announced that the company would be adding the world's largest FPGA - the Virtex Ultrascale+ VU19P, to the 16 nm Virtex Ultrascale+ family. The VU19P contains 35 billion transistors.
In June 2019, Xilinx announced that it was shipping its first Versal chips. Using ACAP, the chips’ hardware and software can be programmed to run almost any kind of AI software. On October 1, 2019, Xilinx announced the launch of Vitis, a unified free and open source software platform that helps developers take advantage of hardware adaptability.
In 2019, Xilinx exceeded $3 billion in annual revenues for the first time, announcing revenues of $3.06 billion, up 24% from the prior fiscal year. Revenues were $828 million for the fourth quarter of the fiscal year 2019, up 4% from the prior quarter and up 30% year over year. Xilinx's communications sector represented 41% of the revenue; the industrial, aerospace and defense sectors represented 27%; the data center and test, measurement & emulation sectors accounted for 18%; and the automotive, broadcast and consumer markets contributed 14%.
In August 2020, Subaru announced the use of one of Xilinx's chips as processing power for camera images in its driver-assistance system. In September 2020, Xilinx announced its new chipset, the T1 Telco Accelerator card, that can be used for units running on an open RAN 5G network.
On October 27, 2020, AMD reached an agreement to acquire Xilinx in a stock-swap deal, valuing the company at $35 billion. The deal was expected to close by the end of 2021. Their stockholders approved the acquisition on April 7, 2021. The deal was completed on February 14, 2022. Since the acquisition was completed, all Xilinx products are co-branded as AMD Xilinx; started in June 2023, all Xilinx's products are now being consolidated under AMD's branding.
In December 2020, Xilinx announced they were acquiring the assets of Falcon Computing Systems to enhance the free and open source Vitis platform, a design software for adaptable processing engines to enable highly optimized domain specific accelerators.
In April 2021, Xilinx announced a collaboration with Mavenir to boost cell phone tower capacity for open 5G networks. That same month, the company unveiled the Kria portfolio, a line of small form factor system-on-modules that come with a pre-built software stack to simplify development. In June, Xilinx announced it was acquiring German software developer Silexica, for an undisclosed amount.