Xilinx acquires Solarflare within its 'data center first' strategy

On April 24, Xilinx, the inventor of the FPGA, programmable SoCs, and the ACAP, announced the planned acquisition of the California-based Solarflare Communications, a provider of high-performance, low latency networking solutions. A prerequisite to the union of these companies was their successful two-year collaboration on the advanced networking technology with Xilinx a strategic investor.

The result of the cooperation was a new single-chip FPGA-based 100G SmartNIC. This solution allows to process receive and transmit of 100 million packets-per-second at 75 watts.

After the acquisition Solarflare will complement Xilinx's industry-leading FPGA, MPSoC and ACAP solutions with ultra-low latency network interface card technology (NIC) and Onload application acceleration software.

The acquisition is expected to close in Xilinx's second quarter of the fiscal year 2020. This deal is one more example of consolidation in the semiconductor industry—we explored this topic in our blog earlier.

Promwad engineers are actively using the latest Xilinx FPGAs in their designs. We have gained experience in developments based on the seventh series: Spartan-7, Artix-7, Kintex-7, Virtex-7. Also, we got a license for MATLAB & Simulink, one of the best graphical programming environments for modelling, simulating and analyzing of communication systems and automatic source code generation for FPGA design and programming.