James V. Barnett II is an American engineer and co-founder of the FPGA developer Xilinx.
Barnett earned a BS degree in Ceramic Engineering from the University of Illinois in 1967.
The three individuals had been working together at Zilog where Freeman wished to develop chips that were blank and users could program the logic themselves and envisioned the field-programmable gate array.
They raised $4.25 million in venture capital from Hambrecht & Quist and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, among others, to form Xilinx, Inc., in 1984.
[1][2][3] Barnett was inducted into the University of Illinois College of Engineering Hall of Fame in 2012.