Founded in 1984, Xilinx is a multibillion-dollar technology company known for highly flexible and adaptive processing equipment that enables innovation from the cloud to the edge to the endpoint. Among its innovation firsts are the first commercially available field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and first fabless manufacturing model. The company was expanding beyond chips and developer tools with a new ecosystem of system-on-modules (SOMs) and supporting software. Designed for software engineers who don’t have the time or capability to create their own hardware and want to get to market fast, these adaptive, production-ready devices function like a small computer, enabling rapid deployment in edge-based applications. Because Catchword had developed the name for its Telco Accelerator Card and Content 360 sales tool, Xilinx came to us for help.
This new type of offering needed to stand apart from existing Xilinx products, whose names were mostly Latinate/Ancient Greek coinages and ended in hard consonants (Zynq, Virtex). Because the name would be paired with the company brand before and alphanumeric product designations after, it needed to be short. Kria, adapted from the Sanskrit word for “action” and “performance,” starts with a confident velar plosive “k” and ends with a friendly “ah.” It subtly recalls the word create—what these products enable engineers to do—and, when spelled kriya, is a yoga term for a specific set of exercises, suggesting a method for advancement.
Kria launched in 2021 and was quickly adopted by manufacturers and designers. Xilinx was later acquired by AMD and the company brand eventually retired, but the name Kria was retained. The line continues to grow with new partnerships and products.
