One of the favorite unfair tactics of the press is to pounce on a newly-selected executive and ask him or her to foretell the future of the industry. This is particularly mean if the executive involved is making a major industry transition. But sometimes it yields some very interesting insights. That was the case today in a chat with Moshe Gavrielov, the newly-appointed president and CEO of Xilinx.

Gavrielov’s previous assignments haven’t been obviously connected to his new one. He spent ten years designing high-performance processors and peripherals. Then there was a long stay at then-LSI Logic, where, in Gavrielov’s words, he helped drive the transition from LSI as a company that supplied empty gate arrays to a company rich in IP and integration expertise. The third phase of Gavrielov’s career took place at start-up Verisity and then at acquiring company Cadence. “We recognized then that front-end logic verification had become the top problem in chip design,” Gavrielov said. “In fact, I think it still is one of the top problems.”

So other than general management experience, what does this background have to do with running a $2B, apparently maturing, fabless FPGA giant? Gavrielov sites an interesting parallel. “I think the opportunity for growth here is that FPGAs are becoming more and more relevant to a wider range of designers. But it’s not just about gates—it’s about the IP as well. In that way, Xilinx today is in a similar transition to the one LSI had while I was there: moving from a supplier of blank gates to also being a supplier and supporter of the IP that goes into the gates. But supporting a body of IP in the field is a non-trivial undertaking.”

So Gavrielov sees a three-fold challenge for Xilinx. First, it must maintain its pace in enlarging the capabilities of the underlying silicon. Second, it must build its portfolio of IP across a growing breadth of applications. And third, the company must continue to pour investment into its development tools, so they are able both to serve the needs of an increasingly diverse—and, one suspects, increasingly specialized and FPGA-naive—community of users and to continue hiding the growing complexity of the actual FPGA circuitry from those users.

But on the other hand, “This also requires scaling. We can’t grow revenue that much by linear growth in people. So we must invest in tools and IP in order to serve a much wider market using the people we have.”