Making the future possible with <programmable> logic
Flexible chip hardware is the key to keeping up with cutting-edge technology
SAN JOSE >> For Victor Peng, becoming CEO at programmable logic chipmaker Xilinx may have come with a few benefits, but a better parking space wasn’t included.
“We don’t do that around here,” laughed Peng during a meeting in his office at Xilinx’s San Jose headquarters. “That’s not something I would want to instill, either.”
Peng is fairly new to the CEO chair, having taken on his job at Xilinx in late January. That doesn’t mean he was unfamiliar with what Xilinx does, as he joined the company in 2008, and served a stint as chief operating officer before taking over from former Xilinx CEO Moshe Gavrielov under a company succession plan.
Peng faced Wall Street analysts recently, and laid out plans for Xilinx to boost its spending this year by 10 percent, and put more emphasis on artificial intelligence technologies. Prior to that meeting, he talked about matters such as where Xilinx sees its future growth opportunities and where consumers might encounter the company’s products.
His comments have been edited for length and clarity.
Q
Xilinx has been known in the semiconductor market for a long time for its programmable logic products. How would you describe what that, and Xilinx is, for the average person who might not be up on everything in the chip sector?
A
People are more familiar with semiconductors like CPUs (central processing units) or, now, GPUs (graphic processor units) that are popular in gaming. Those products are fixed and can’t be modified. A programmable logic device, which is a form that Xilinx invented, is a semiconductor device that, at the hardware level, at the lowest level, can be modified. And since you can modify it, there’s a lot of flexibility that goes well beyond what other devices can do.
And because of that, our products are in an incredible amount of other products and applications. If you use the internet, it’s highly likely that what you are doing is going to be routed through some communications infrastructure that uses our technology. If you place a phone call, all the base stations have a lot of Xilinx technology in them. We’re in drones. We’re in robots. The Mars Land Rover had a Xilinx product in it. We’re in cars and their advanced driving systems. We’re in so many devices because of this great flexibility we have down at the hardware level.
Q
What are some of the industries you see Xilinx going after, or that are hot markets for your type of technology?
A
We serve multiple markets, but one of those where we think there is significant growth for us is in the data center. There’s a lot of disruption in the data center right now, and people are innovating with the architecture there. We see that we really have a big opportunity in the three sides of the data center — the compute side, the storage side and the networking side. So, the data center is a prominent part of my strategy for Xilinx.
Q
While the data center is a growth area, and getting a lot of new emphasis, what do you say to what has been your traditional customer base to ensure its position with Xilinx?
A
We’re still 100 percent committed to our core customers. You get the sense of the breadth of our markets. If you look at automotive customers, we’re in advanced driver systems, moving to fully autonomous driving, which a lot of people are talking about. We’re in wireless infrastructure, like the 5G transformation that is going to happen. We’re in wired communications. We’re in the industrial markets. We’re in aerospace and defense. We’re in some AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) products, too. We’re going to continue to support these customers with new products and technologies and accelerate our growth with them.
Q
If we can look at one of these areas, let’s take automotive, which is getting a lot of attention. What role does a Xilinx chip, or platform, play in this market?
A
We’ve been serving the automotive market for well over a decade. What we used to do is what’s called “infotainment” — things used for entertainment, but also information systems. But, about eight years ago, our team saw there was going to be this move to advanced driver safety systems. And we started moving into that. But back then, that was new territory and we had to come up to speed with a lot of things related to the safety aspects of the automobile. We went through that learning, and we’ve been very successful in systems for features like lane departure and braking technologies. And since our products are so flexible, we can take radio input, radar input, all these different kinds of sensors, and find a place in systems today with multiple manufacturers in many, many models. And we have shipped 40 million units over all these years.
Q
You’ve been with Xilinx for 10 years, and CEO for a few months. From a professional standpoint, what was it like to transition to being CEO after being with Xilinx for a decade?
A
We did go through a transition period where I was the COO, before becoming CEO. I had a period where I was responsible for everything I had originally, which is product development, the research and development, product planning. But, then I picked up all of sales, most of the operations, and the marketing. The good news is that I got another level of understanding, which turbo-boosted me on understanding all the key functions we have here. Once I went through that, I felt quite well-prepared and it’s been very satisfying.