Xilinx acquires DeePhi as a new weapon in FPGA war with Intel

As FPGA (field programmable gate array) chips become crucial in growth markets like cloud and telecoms infrastructure and the Internet of Things (IoT), the rivalry between the two major suppliers – Intel, thanks to its acquisition of Altera, and Xilinx – is heating up. This battle was intensified last week when Xilinx bought a 200-person Chinese start-up called DeePhi, probably to secure a strong team of developers in a market where skills shortages are pronounced. In the three years since Intel bought Altera, it has aligned itself with Microsoft, which now installs an Altera FPGA in all the new servers it spins up. Xilinx, in turn, has sided with Microsoft Azure’s chief rival, Amazon’s AWS wing, with a deal in…