Xilinx Stock Hits New High

Shares of Xilinx Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) touched a new 52-week high of $34.90 on Wednesday. ZTE Corp. has named Xilinx 2010 Best Global Supplier. This prestigious award recognizes Xilinx as a preferred supplier and technology innovator for demonstrating excellence in cost, quality, support and delivery.

Synopsys, Inc. (NASDAQ: :SNPS) and Xilinx announced the availability of the FPGA-Based Prototyping Methodology Manual (FPMM), a practical guide to using FPGAs as a platform for system-on-chip (SoC) development.

Programmable logic device maker Xilinx said the FPMM captures valuable design and verification expertise contributed by engineering teams from BBC Research & Development; Design of System on Silicon, S.A. (DS2); Freescale Semiconductor; LSI, Inc.; NVIDIA Corp.; STMicroelectronics; and Texas Instruments (TI), which have successfully employed FPGA-based prototyping to accelerate complex ASIC and SoC development projects.

Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC) is looking for growth drivers and is especially keen on expanding in the wireless market, this might lead to Xilinx being an ideal acquisition candidate, according to Seeking Alpha. There are also synergies to take significant costs out of Xilinx operations. Xilinx is not only a good fit for Intel, but it is cheap.

Xilinx appears to have caught up with Altera (NASDAQ: ALTR) in technology, but the stock is comparatively cheap. PLD’s (Programmable Logic Devices) are a secular growth story, and the duopoly has afforded these companies exceptionally large gross margins. These characteristics make Xilinx an ideal acquisition candidate, Nigam Arora wrote in Seeking Alpha.

The San Jose, California-based Xilinx stock gapped open sharply higher Wednesday at $33.32, compared to previous day Tuesday's close of $32.70. The stock touched a new 52-week high of $34.90 during the Wednesday's trading session.

The stock closed Wednesday's regular trading up 5.63 percent at $34.54 on a volume of 8.61 million shares on the NASDAQ stock market. In the after-hours, the stock rose 0.06 percent to $34.56. The stock traded between $22.75 and $34.90.