Xilinx

Yeah, I mean, it's a natural fit for Zephyr, right? Yeah, kind of.

Okay, so this is a low-cost development board for the Xilinx Zynx 7000.

This is one of those monster FPGA.

And this is low-cost, so it only costs $619.

There's a new West runner for open FPGA loader.

Oh, yeah.

I don't know if this is something that the Xilinx board use, but...

Yeah, it makes it easier to flash and I guess debug probably with the good old West Flash, West Debug commands.

Yeah, but I think what I like so much about it is that you... you learn so much.

When we founded the company, a friend of us, he exited to Xilinx, then to AMD, a software company.

He said, you're going to put like a 20 to 30 year career in 5 to 10 years.

And I told him, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah.

Oh, so that has to be on the...

I think the AMD stuff is typically on the Cortex-A for their Xilinx-derived.

Yeah, looking at the PR description, it's Cortex-A, most likely.

Fancy.

And we've been in this business for, I think, 42 years now.

We're one of the early FPGA vendors, along with what was at the time Xilinx, Altera, and I forgot, Actel, I think was the original name.

They've all changed hands.

We're kind of last man standing of those guys that were all independent.

Now they're spun out.

They're private equity.

Xilinx got picked up by AMD.

They're part of AMD now.

Funny enough, Zach, we actually just introduced within our group what we call Forge FPGA.

Now, it's not necessarily to, you know, compete head to head against the Xilinx and Alteras of the world.

But a lot of our customers, again, we're a very customer-centric group, if you haven't picked up on that.

But a lot of our customers had asked for, you know, just more digital resources to implement, you know, just more complex functions or control state machines that our existing, you know, green pack products maybe didn't afford.

Because, again, it's, you know, you kind of go develop products as your customers need them.

And there does seem to be this unserved market space where customers just need something more than a green pack, but not something so full.

fully fledged as an expensive Xilinx or Altair FPGA solution so we have a Forge FPGA product line now we just went to market or about to go to market with our second product and have many others to follow but that's something to look into and we'll leave it for another podcast

Yeah, we'll do another episode where we talk about that, because I think that would be pretty cool to get into.

Most of them got acquired.

Linear, Maxim, Xilinx, Altera, National Semi.

They all got bought by Texas Instruments, Analog Devices and other companies.

And so it's kind of a crazy move, but it turned out to be a great sector because there's a combination of different business models, right? I feel like there's two things that young people should probably focus on more.

... we then decided to assess the competition.

Obviously, we looked at AMD and their machine leaning efforts at the time, and also Xilinx, which we invested in prior to them being acquired by AMD.

We also looked at 12 startups building AI chips at the time.

One of them was Cerebras.