Ross Freeman

Ross Freeman (1948 to 1989) was an American electrical engineer and inventor, and a co-founder of the programmable chip maker Xilinx. He was born on 26 July 1948 in the upper peninsula of Michigan and grew up on a farm near Engadine. He earned a physics degree at Michigan State University in 1969 and a master's degree at the University of Illinois in 1971, worked in the Peace Corps, and then designed a custom circuit at Teletype Corporation. Freeman reasoned that because of Moore's Law transistors would become cheaper every year, which would make chips that customers could program themselves affordable, an idea that seemed far out at the time. With Bernard Vonderschmitt and James V Barnett II he co-founded Xilinx in 1984, and a year later he invented the first field-programmable gate array, covered by patent 4,870,302, a chip of open gates that engineers can reprogram to add functions or adapt to changing standards. He died in 1989, and in 2006 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame; Xilinx has honoured an employee each year since 1992 with the Ross Freeman Award for Technical Innovation.