Acquisition of Xilinx by AMD to bring competitive advantage in the chip business

AMD's pending acquisition of Xilinx is now a hot discussion across wall street. If the deal clicks through, that could be valued at more than $30 billion and mark the latest big tie-up in the rapidly consolidating semiconductor industry. The transaction will be immediately accretive to AMD margins, cash flow and EPS, but what’s more interesting is the technology that Xilinx brings to the table, as well as the substantial market impact the combined companies could have. AMD is getting a great deal here and opening up a new front against long-time rival Intel.

Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology has played a significant role in the semiconductor solutions arena for decades. FPGAs played pivotal a role in a huge number of systems designs over the years, as a result of their intrinsic time-to-market advantages and flexibility. If there wasn’t an ASIC solution available in market, or if what was available wasn’t quite right for the application, engineers could always roll their own with an FPGA.

If it is seen at the markets Xilinx serves - from the cloud to the edge, with SmartNIC solutions for the data center, to critical 5G infrastructure, machine learning, and ADAS and autonomous vehicles solutions - the company’s products integrate hardened, proven core technologies along with cutting-edge, high speed IO and much more advanced programmable logic. And that programmable logic component is just as critical as it was back in the day, only it too has evolved such that these chips can literally be reprogrammed to adapt on-the-fly, in-band and without even dropping a connection.