Technology

Our technology is everywhere you look.

In the decades since we invented the world’s first FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), tens of thousands of design engineers have used Xilinx to invent the products we now take for granted. From the TV you watch, to the way your computer processes data, even to the car you drive—our thinking touches almost every aspect of your life, now and in the future.

For example, Convey uses our FPGA in their high performance computing, creating a computer that does the work of 16 Intel servers. (Moore’s Law in action!) Samsung Security, meanwhile, uses our programmable logic to run surveillance cameras. Our FPGAs allow cameras to zoom in, stabilize motion and highlight areas within the video image for greater detail.

Our work is also used in scientific research. CERN's ALICE experiment accelerates two streams of heavy lead ions very close to the speed of light and then make the streams collide head-on, generating a huge amount of energy and a temperature that's 100,000 times hotter than the sun's core. This results in "deconfinement," where quarks and gluons aren't contained within protons and neutrons. Our FPGAs are helping scientists track those particles, giving us a glimpse of how the universe may have looked immediately after the Big Bang.

Speaking of the universe, we’re helping explore that too. Our chips are in NASA’s Mars Rover, operating the arms, wheels, cameras and other instruments. NASA also recently sent a complex experimental payload (affectionately named “SpaceCube”) up to the Hubble Space Telescope to provide real-time image tracking. The chips at the heart of SpaceCube? You guessed it: that was us too.

That’s just a snapshot of how our customers use Xilinx technologies—there’s a lot more where that came from.