Programmable chip maker Xilinx acquires C/C++ programming tool provider Silexica | ZDNet

Xilinx, one of the world’s biggest programmable chipmakers, announced a new deal to acquire C/C++ programming and analysis tool provider Silexica. 

Xilinx is still in the midst of its own acquisition by Advanced Micro Devices, which bought the company for $35 billion in October. Xilinx develops dynamic processor technology and is credited with creating programmable system-on-chip designs (SoCs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and a scalable compute acceleration platform called ACAP. 

Xilinx is planning to merge Silexica and its SLX FPGA tool suite with the Xilinx Vitis unified software platform in an effort to make it easier to use for software developers building sophisticated applications. 

Salil Raje, an executive vice president and general manager at Xilinx, said software programmability was a key aspect of the company’s long term plans to “accelerate the path from software to application-optimized hardware systems.”

“Silexica’s technology complements our existing Vitis solution and roadmap and will accelerate our ability to attract a wider range of developers seeking to leverage our heterogeneous computing architectures,” Raje said. 

The company statement explained that Silexica’s SLX FPGA tool suite “tackles non-synthesizable and non-hardware aware C/C++ code, detects application parallelism, inserts pragmas, and determines optimal software and hardware partitioning.” 

The benefits of this include the ability to design at a higher level of abstraction and it allows for “orders of magnitude faster simulation, and a better result through high-level optimizations and design space exploration.”

Former Silexica CEO Maximilian Odendahl added that the tool was designed to close the “gap between the software and hardware developer domains,”

“The integration of our technology with the Xilinx Vitis portfolio fully aligns with our goal of making adaptive computing accessible to software developers. We are excited to continue the journey as part of the Xilinx Vitis team,” Odendahl said. 

The company was originally created from work that started at Germany’s RWTH Aachen University in 2014 and is headquartered in Cologne.