Ross Freeman (July 26, 1948 – October 22, 1989), was an American electrical engineer and inventor, and co-founder of the leading FPGA developer Xilinx.
Freeman was born in the upper peninsula of Michigan on July 26, 1948. He grew up on a farm near Engadine, Michigan. [1] [2]
Freeman earned a BS degree in physics from Michigan State University in 1969 and a master’s from University of Illinois in 1971. [3] He worked in the Peace Corps for several years, then went to Teletype Corporation to design a custom PMOS circuit. [3]
Ross postulated that because of Moore's Law, transistors would be getting less expensive each year, making customizable programmable chips affordable. The idea was "far out" at the time, but the company and technology grew quickly, eventually catching the attention of new-found competitors in what is now a mature industry. [4] [5]
With Bernard Vonderschmitt and James V Barnett II Freeman co-founded Xilinx in 1984, and a year later invented the first field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Freeman's invention - patent 4,870,302 - is a computer chip full of 'open gates' that engineers can reprogram as much as needed to add new functionality, adapt to changing standards or specifications and make last minute design changes. [6]
Freeman died in 1989, only a few years after creating a new industry with the FPGA and launching what would become a multi-billion dollar company.
In 2006, 17 years after his death, Freeman was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, which honors men and women responsible for fundamental technology advances for human, social and economic progress. [3] [7] [8] That year was the integrated circuit's 50th anniversary so the hall of fame inductees were themed with inventions fundamental to modern computing. [7]
To honor Freeman's memory, encourage technical innovation, and reward employees, Xilinx began a new tradition in 1992 of honoring a Xilinx employee each year with the Ross Freeman Award for Technical Innovation. [6] Participants are nominated, finalists are chosen by a nomination committee at Xilinx and award winners are chosen by a vote from the company's technical staff. [6]
A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is a type of configurable integrated circuit that can be repeatedly programmed after manufacturing. FPGAs are a subset of logic devices referred to as programmable logic devices (PLDs). They consist of an array of programmable logic blocks with a connecting grid, that can be configured "in the field" to interconnect with other logic blocks to perform various digital functions. FPGAs are often used in limited (low) quantity production of custom-made products, and in research and development, where the higher cost of individual FPGAs is not as important, and where creating and manufacturing a custom circuit wouldn't be feasible. Other applications for FPGAs include the telecommunications, automotive, aerospace, and industrial sectors, which benefit from their flexibility, high signal processing speed, and parallel processing abilities.
Robert Norton Noyce, nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", was an American physicist and entrepreneur who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel Corporation in 1968. He was also credited with the realization of the first monolithic integrated circuit or microchip made with silicon, which fueled the personal computer revolution and gave Silicon Valley its name.
Jack St. Clair Kilby was an American electrical engineer who took part, along with Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor, in the realization of the first integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments (TI) in 1958. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on 10 December 2000.
The National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF) is an American not-for-profit organization, founded in 1973, which recognizes individual engineers and inventors who hold a U.S. patent of significant technology. Besides the Hall of Fame, it also operates a museum in Alexandria, Virginia, sponsors educational programs, and a collegiate competition.
An application-specific integrated circuit is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficiency video codec. Application-specific standard product chips are intermediate between ASICs and industry standard integrated circuits like the 7400 series or the 4000 series. ASIC chips are typically fabricated using metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) technology, as MOS integrated circuit chips.
Reconfigurable computing is a computer architecture combining some of the flexibility of software with the high performance of hardware by processing with flexible hardware platforms like field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The principal difference when compared to using ordinary microprocessors is the ability to add custom computational blocks using FPGAs. On the other hand, the main difference from custom hardware, i.e. application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) is the possibility to adapt the hardware during runtime by "loading" a new circuit on the reconfigurable fabric, thus providing new computational blocks without the need to manufacture and add new chips to the existing system.
Marcian Edward "Ted" Hoff Jr. is one of the inventors of the microprocessor.
Federico Faggin is an Italian-American physicist, engineer, inventor and entrepreneur. He is best known for designing the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004. He led the 4004 (MCS-4) project and the design group during the first five years of Intel's microprocessor effort. Faggin also created, while working at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968, the self-aligned MOS (metal–oxide–semiconductor) silicon-gate technology (SGT), which made possible MOS semiconductor memory chips, CCD image sensors, and the microprocessor. After the 4004, he led development of the Intel 8008 and 8080, using his SGT methodology for random logic chip design, which was essential to the creation of early Intel microprocessors. He was co-founder and CEO of Zilog, the first company solely dedicated to microprocessors, and led the development of the Zilog Z80 and Z8 processors. He was later the co-founder and CEO of Cygnet Technologies, and then Synaptics.
Altera Corporation is a manufacturer of programmable logic devices (PLDs) headquartered in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1983 and acquired by Intel in 2015 before becoming independent once again in 2024 as a company focused on development of Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology and system on a chip FPGAs.
Xilinx, Inc. was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company is renowned for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA). It also pioneered the first fabless manufacturing model.
Lattice Semiconductor Corporation is an American semiconductor company specializing in the design and manufacturing of low power field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Headquartered in the Silicon Forest area of Hillsboro, Oregon, the company also has operations in San Jose, Calif., Shanghai, Manila, Penang, and Singapore. Lattice Semiconductor has more than 1000 employees and an annual revenue of more than $660 million as of 2022. The company was founded in 1983 and went public in 1989. It is traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the symbol LSCC.
The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device. It is the most common measure of integrated circuit complexity. The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observes that transistor count doubles approximately every two years. However, being directly proportional to the area of a die, transistor count does not represent how advanced the corresponding manufacturing technology is. A better indication of this is transistor density which is the ratio of a semiconductor's transistor count to its die area.
Jingsheng Jason Cong is a Chinese-born American computer scientist, educator, and serial entrepreneur. He received his B.S. degree in computer science from Peking University in 1985, his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1987 and 1990, respectively. He has been on the faculty in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) since 1990. Currently, he is a Distinguished Chancellor's Professor and the director of Center for Domain-Specific Computing (CDSC).
Lubomyr Taras Romankiw was a Ukrainian-Canadian-American Electrochemist, Material Scientist and Engineer, and a world-renowned inventor. Although a Canadian citizen, he spent his entire career at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He was an IBM fellow, the highest technical ranking at IBM.
Eric R. Fossum is an Emmy award-winning American engineer who co-developed some of the active pixel image sensor with intra-pixel charge transfer, with the help of other scientists from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is a professor at Thayer School of Engineering in Dartmouth College.
Virtex is the flagship family of FPGA products currently developed by AMD, originally Xilinx before being acquired by the former. Other current product lines include Kintex (mid-range) and Artix (low-cost), each including configurations and models optimized for different applications. In addition, AMD offers the Spartan low-cost series, which continues to be updated and is nearing production utilizing the same underlying architecture and process node as the larger 7-series devices.
Tabula, Inc., was an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. Founded in 2003 by Steve Teig, it raised $215 million in venture funding. The company designed and built three dimensional field programmable gate arrays and ranked third on the Wall Street Journal's annual "Next Big Thing" list in 2012.
Stephen "Steve" Trimberger is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer, philanthropist, and prolific inventor with 250 US utility patents as of August 26, 2021. He is a DARPA program manager of the microsystems technology office.
In computing, a logic block or configurable logic block (CLB) is a fundamental building block of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. Logic blocks can be configured by the engineer to provide reconfigurable logic gates.
James V. Barnett II is an American engineer and co-founder of the FPGA developer Xilinx.