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Willem P. "Wim" Roelandts has served as president and chief executive officer of Xilinx since January 1996. He is responsible for formulating the company's overall strategy vision and focus necessary for Xilinx to continue its pace of rapid growth and expansion.
During Roelandts' tenure at Xilinx revenue has doubled to about $1 billion. Today Xilinx is widely recognized as one of best managed and most financially sound high technology companies in the world. In 2001 BusinessWeek ranked Xilinx No. 14 in listing of the top 50 companies in the S&P 500 Index. FORTUNE recently added Xilinx to the magazine's coveted list of the top 100 companies to work for and Forbes now includes Xilinx in its list of America's 400 best big companies. Under Roelandts' leadership Xilinx has also become the leading supplier of programmable logic chips one of the fastest growing segments of the overall semiconductor industry. Market researcher Dataquest now ranks Xilinx as the fifth largest supplier of custom logic chips in the world.
Since joining Xilinx Roelandts has played an increasingly active role in industry affairs. He serves on the board of directors of the Semiconductor Industry Association and the Technology Network and he is president of the Fabless Semiconductor Association. Roelandts also frequently acts as a keynote speaker at industry conferences and trade shows and is a frequent guest on CNBC televison.
Roelandts joined Xilinx after a 30-year career in management at Hewlett-Packard Co. In his last position there he served as senior vice president and was responsible for all aspects of HP's then $6 billion worldwide computer systems business including research and development manufacturing marketing professional services and sales.
Roelandts joined Hewlett-Packard in 1967 as a service engineer in Belgium. He was promoted to customer-engineering/systems engineering manager in 1973. In 1975 he was transferred to HP's former Grenoble (France) Division where he was product support manager European support center manager and research and development manager.
In 1982 Roelandts was named operations manager for the Grenoble Networks Operation. In 1983 he was named R&D manager for HP's Information Networks Division in Cupertino California. He was promoted to division general manager in 1984 and to general manager for the Information Networks Group in 1985.
Roelandts was elected as HP vice president in 1988 and became general manager of the Computer Systems Group later that year. He was named general manager of the Networked Systems Group in 1990 when HP realigned its computer business activities and was named general manager of the Computer Systems Organization in 1992. He was elected a senior vice president in 1993.
Roelandts was born January 4 1945 in Lennik Belgium. He earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Rijks Hogere Technische School in Anderlecht Belgium in 1965. | 