() is the world's largest developer and manufacturer of a class of reconfigurable hardware
Chip s known as
Field-programmable Gate Array s (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 and
Longmont, Colorado . Xilinx is a fabless IC manufacturer.
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
PROM s.
The Virtex-II Pro and Virtex-4 FPGA families are of particular interest to system-on-a-chip
SoC designers because they can include up to two embedded
IBM PowerPC 405 cores. 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 Core s designed in
HDL and 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 being 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.
Other FPGA developers are
Altera ,
Lattice Semiconductor ,
Actel ,
Quicklogic , and
Atmel .
