Xilinx goes “80% ASIC” with an RF chip for Evenstar Open RAN networks 

Even before it was acquired by AMD in a $49bn deal earlier this year, Xilinx had proclaimed that it was “no longer an FPGA company”. Not only did it have other product lines, notably in RF, but it had developed a flexible architecture that took in different kinds of chip, alongside the field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) it had pioneered.    Now part of a larger company that made its fortune in central processors (CPUs), AMD, Xilinx has an even more multi-faceted story for its markets, including one of its key targets, 5G infrastructure. Last week it unveiled its latest radio chip, the Zynq UltraScale+, which takes it several steps away from an FPGA-only platform. This is an RF system-on-chip…