Xilinx, Inc.

Company overview. Xilinx, Inc. is a semiconductor company founded in 1984 in San Jose, California, by Ross Freeman, Jim Barnett, and Bernie Vonderschmitt, who invented the field-programmable gate array (FPGA). It was publicly traded on NASDAQ (XLNX) until AMD (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.) completed its roughly $35 billion all-stock acquisition in February 2022; Xilinx now operates as AMD's Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group, with products consolidated under AMD branding. Headcount and revenue figures for the standalone company are no longer separately published; Xilinx was a large-cap company at acquisition and, per AMD, the deal was valued at about $49 billion at closing.

Products / operations. Xilinx designs programmable logic devices and adaptive compute platforms, principally FPGAs (Spartan, Artix, Kintex, and Virtex families), Zynq programmable SoCs integrating ARM processors, and Versal adaptive compute acceleration platforms (ACAPs), plus the Vivado and Vitis design-tool suites and Alveo data-center accelerator cards. Its silicon is used in 5G/6G wireless infrastructure, automotive ADAS and in-vehicle systems, aerospace and defense electronics, industrial automation, and data-center AI acceleration.

Patent-litigation posture. Xilinx is an operating company that appeared as defendant against a patent-assertion plaintiff and as petitioner in a defensive IPR. Both tracked matters stem from one dispute: Sentient Sensors, LLC sued Xilinx in the District of Delaware (No. 22-cv-00173, filed February 2022), and Xilinx—joined by AMD and ATI Technologies ULC—petitioned for inter partes review (IPR2023-00195) in February 2023. The pattern (one IPR petition as "plaintiff," one Federal Circuit appeal as "defendant") is a standard defensive response to a third-party patent assertion, not offensive licensing litigation; the underlying suit was in Delaware, not the Eastern District of Texas.

Notable cases. In IPR2023-00195, Xilinx challenged U.S. Patent No. 6,938,177 ("Multi-Chip Module Smart Controller"); the PTAB's September 2024 final written decision found challenged claims unpatentable, and the Federal Circuit affirmed under Rule 36 in April 2026 (No. 25-1058). Sentient Sensors identifies itself and Management Sciences Inc. as real parties in interest; the '177 patent was developed under a CRADA with U.S. Air Force funding.