Xilinx, Inc. ( ) is an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company was known for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and creating the first fabless manufacturing model. Xilinx was co-founded by Ross Freeman, Bernard Vonderschmitt, and James V Barnett II in 1984 and the company went public on the NASDAQ in 1990. AMD announced its acquisition of Xilinx in October 2020 and the deal was completed on February 14, 2022, through an all-stock transaction worth an estimated $60 billion. Company overview Xilinx was founded in Silicon Valley in 1984 and headquartered in San Jose, United States, with additional offices in Longmont, United States; Dublin, Ireland; Singapore; Hyderabad, India; Beijing, China; Shanghai, China; Brisbane, Australia and Tokyo, Japan. According to Bill Carter, former CTO and current 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 sells a broad range of FPGAs, complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs), design tools, intellectual property and reference designs. Xilinx customers represent just over half of the entire programmable logic market, at 51%. Altera (now Intel) is Xilinx's strongest competitor with 34% of the market. Other key players in this market are Actel (now Microsemi), and Lattice Semiconductor. History Early history Ross Freeman, 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. FPGA 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