In what is looking to be the second historic acquisition in the semiconductor industry, AMD is reportedly in advanced talks to acquire FPGPA-maker Xilinx for a whopping $30 billion. As per sources familiar with the matter, a decision may come as soon as next week.
Xilinx is known for its FPGAs and AMD has already leveraged its solutions in some of its products, most notably the Epyc server processors.
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are semiconductor devices that are based around a matrix of configurable logic blocks (CLBs) connected via programmable interconnects. FPGAs can be reprogrammed to desired application or functionality requirements after manufacturing. This feature distinguishes FPGAs from Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), which are custom manufactured for specific design tasks. Although one-time programmable (OTP) FPGAs are available, the dominant types are SRAM based which can be reprogrammed as the design evolves.
Xilinx
Xilinx’s latest products, the Versal Premium ACAPs are based on the 7nm process node with support for PCIe 5.0, CXL, 600G ethernet cores, with up to 123TBps of bandwidth across the NOC. It’s not hard to see where these products would fit into AMD’s portfolio. Using the Infinity Fabric interconnect and the chiplet technology, they could be easily integrated into its Data Center solutions to improve AI and neural network workloads.
Just as NVIDIA used its stocks to buy Arm, AMD will likely use the same path to purchase Xilinx. Thanks to the recent gains in its stock value, AMD now has a market value of $100 with each share priced near $90, with a target of nearly $140-$150 by the next year’s end.
