XILINX COLORADO EXUDES COLORADO CULTURE.

• Author: BRONIKOWSKI, LYNN
• Position: Brief Article

It started with indoor bike racks at high-flying Boulder chip maker Xilinx Colorado. Employees rode their bikes to work and management provided a safe place to store them.

Five years later, Xilinx Colorado has outgrown its Boulder facilities on West 55th Street, and plans next year to move into a 130,000-square-foot facility on a 60-acre campus in Longmont.

The showcase plant will house 400 staffers -- more than double the 180 who work in Boulder.

"It will have a flagstone walking mall, a series of little ponds and rivers, a barbecue and camping area, a kids' fishing pond, and modem hookups so employees can use their laptops in a grove of aspen," said Kenn Perry, managing director of Xilinx Colorado.

The company's San Jose, Calif. parent, Xilinx Inc., is eager to capture the Colorado culture, even appointing an employee committee. The committee decided indoor recreational facilities, bus service, bike paths and, of course, indoor bike racks were musts.

"We want this plant to be a place that people will visit with their families on weekends," said Perry, wearing shorts amid the casual Xilinx environment.

Xilinx Colorado's culture is par for a company that in 1984 revolutionized programmable logic solutions when it introduced the field programmable gate array, or FPGA.

"We're basically a semiconductor manufacturer (of) blank pieces of silicon (and) people use our software to program their own unique integrated circuits," said Mike Seither, spokesman at Xilink's headquarters. "We're in the programmable logic market, which means the logic elements on our chips, people can reprogram an infinite number of times."

Traditionally, customers would develop software, then send the software to a foundry to make into a chip, Seither said. The foundry "produces a physical chip that they bring back and test out. That process can take 18 months to two years. If there's a mistake, they have to physically fix it, go back and make another chip."

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