Prof. Dr. Thorsten Jungmann (last updated 2026-10-03)
Ross Freeman (1948–1989) was an American electrical engineer and inventor, and co-founder of Xilinx (since 2022 part of AMD), a leading developer of field-programmable gate arrays. He grew up on a farm near Engadine in the upper peninsula of Michigan. He earned a BS degree in physics from Michigan State University in 1969 and a master’s degree from the University of Illinois in 1971. After several years in the Peace Corps he went to Teletype Corporation to design a custom PMOS circuit.
Freeman postulated that, because of Moore’s law, transistors would become less expensive each year, which would make customizable programmable chips affordable. With Bernard Vonderschmitt and James V Barnett II he co-founded Xilinx in 1984, the year of his patent application for the first field-programmable gate array (FPGA). An FPGA is a configurable integrated circuit that is programmed after manufacturing. It consists of a grid-connected array of programmable logic blocks that can be configured ‘in the field’ to interconnect with other logic blocks and to perform various digital functions. Most FPGAs can be reprogrammed as often as needed, for example to add new functionality, to adapt to changing standards or specifications and to make last-minute design changes; antifuse types can be programmed only once.
The circuit is generally described in a hardware description language (HDL) such as VHDL; design tools convert this description into the configuration data of the FPGA. In 1985 Xilinx produced the first commercially viable FPGA, the XC2064, with 64 configurable logic blocks. Freeman died in 1989, a few years after creating a new industry. In 2009 he was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and since 1992 Xilinx has honoured one employee each year with the Ross Freeman Award for Technical Innovation.
Reference and further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Freeman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array