AMD is said to take over FPGA manufacturer Xilinx

According to information from the Wall Street Journal, AMD is in advanced talks to take over Xilinx - the manufacturer and market leader of so-called field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). This deal is said to be worth over $ 30 billion and could be completed as early as next week.

Both companies have already worked closely together in the past and a takeover would open up opportunities for AMD , for example, to integrate its own chip sets for deep learning and AI into its server processors in the future . The following points are interesting in this context:

• Xilinx has a current market value of 25 billion US dollars
• With Altera, Intel took over Xilinx's biggest competitor for many years at the end of 2015
• Xilinx relies partly on ARM processors for its products and Nvidia is currently in the process of taking over Arm
• Last year, Xilinx bought NGCodec, a specialist in video encoding
• There is currently a major patent dispute with Analog Devices in which AMD's CEO Dr. Lisa Su was on the board until recently, but announced last December that she would no longer be available for this this year (she is now on the Cisco board for that)
• Xilinx has recently achieved double-digit growth in the data center segment and was significantly more successful than all of its competitors, who had partially stagnant sales in this area
• Xilinx has some 7 nm products manufactured by TSMC , which would make AMD an even bigger TSMC customer
• Xilinx recently had annual sales of over $ 3 billion and has been profitable for the past 5 years, with operating profits ranging between $ 669 million and $ 956 million

In the market & technology, there is an  interview (January 2020) with Victor Peng the CEO of Xilinx, which gives a good overview of the company.