Xilinx

Xilinx was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. It is renowned for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array and for pioneering the fabless manufacturing model. Ross Freeman, Bernard Vonderschmitt and James V Barnett II, all former employees of the chip maker Zilog, co-founded it in Silicon Valley in 1984, and it was headquartered in San Jose, California. Freeman had wanted chips that acted like a blank tape which users could program themselves, but Zilog would not invest in the idea, so the three raised venture funding to design the first commercially viable FPGA, and the company began selling its first product by 1985. It went public on the Nasdaq and grew to sell FPGAs, complex programmable logic devices, design tools and reference designs. AMD announced its acquisition in October 2020, completed it in February 2022, and phased the Xilinx brand out in June 2023. It appears in this atlas because the engineer Ross Freeman co-founded it.