Ross Freeman (July 26, 1948 – October 22, 1989), was an American electrical engineer and inventor, and co-founder of the leading FPGA developer Xilinx.
[3] Ross postulated that because of Moore's Law, transistors would be getting less expensive each year, making customizable programmable chips affordable.
The idea was "far out" at the time, but the company and technology grew quickly, eventually catching the attention of new-found competitors in what is now a mature industry.
[4][5] With Bernard Vonderschmitt and James V Barnett II Freeman co-founded Xilinx in 1984, and a year later invented the first field-programmable gate array (FPGA).
In 2006, 17 years after his death, Freeman was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, which honors men and women responsible for fundamental technology advances for human, social and economic progress.