Ross Freeman

Ross H. Freeman ( born July 26, 1944 in Michigan; † 22 October 1989) was an American physicist. He was essential in the field of electronic semiconductor components developer and pioneer in the first available programmable logic arrays, known as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). He also co-founded the still active in this field of business Xilinx. In 2009, Freeman was posthumously received for the development of the first FPGAs into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Ross Freeman graduated in 1969, his studies of physics at Michigan State University with a bachelor's degree in 1971 with a Masters from the University of Illinois. He then worked for the former telecommunications company Teletype Corporation where he developed various PMOS semiconductor circuits. He then worked at Zilog, where he worked as one of the first employees, among others in the late 1970s to the development of the Z8000.

In the early 1980s he began with the development of programmable logic array ( FPGA) whose basic structures and used to this day he patented in 1984. Freeman's idea was, that he may establish in addition to the structure of the array for the interconnection and configuration within the FPGA static memory cells ( SRAMs), which are loaded in the activation of the device by a read only memory with the configuration data. Thus, in contrast to the competing " hardwired " application specific integrated circuits (ASICs ), it was possible to carry out change in the structure of the digital circuitry in the FPGA quickly.

In 1984 he founded, together with Bernie Vonderschmitt and Jim Barnett in Silicon Valley, the company Xilinx. Freeman died five years after founding the company from a chronic illness.