Xilinx acquires Silexica to broaden its developer base

Silexica was spun out of RWTH Aachen University in 2014. Its headquarters are in Cologne, Germany, with offices in Silicon Valley and Japan. It serves companies in the automotive, robotics, wireless communications, aerospace, and financial industries and has received USD 28 million in funding from international investors. “Software programmability is imperative to our long-term goal to accelerate the path from software to application-optimized hardware systems,” says Salil Raje, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Group, Xilinx in a press release. “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.” Leveraging standard high-level synthesis tools from Xilinx, 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. This enables designing at a higher level of abstraction, orders of magnitude faster simulation, and a better result through high-level optimizations and design space exploration. “Silexica’s vision is to create a disruptive developer tool – one that closes the gap between the software and hardware developer domains,” adds Maximilian Odendahl, former CEO of Silexica. “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.”