About Us – Digilent Blog

Upon his retirement from Microsoft in 1998, Gene Apperson and his family relocated to Pullman, Washington. After a few years, Gene decided to go back to school as an undergraduate in mechanical engineering. A professor, Bob Richards, soon asked Gene to switch to the Master’s program, even though most of his background was in electrical engineering. He ended up taking a VLSI design class from none other than Clint Cole. While Gene ended up asking Clint whether he would be able to do well in the class, they got to talking and decided to start a company together.

When Norm MacDonald started working full-time for Digilent back in 2005 – 2006, most of our products were sold in very basic packaging (think anti-static bags and plain white boxes). Totally understandable for a starting company. A few boards were given a bit of branding, though. The Basys and Nexys, of course. These were the simple boxes those came in at the time. (They may have been done by Clint or Jim or some combination of the two.)

In a contest between robot and human…the robot won (at least this round). Breaking one of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, our normally friendly Turbo managed to get in a hit at one of our interns last week when she was troubleshooting.

You’re probably familiar with our chipKIT Pro MX7 and MX4 by now. But how did this line of microcontrollers get its start?

A few weeks ago, we did a throwback that included the D2XL. And now we can take a look back at the original Digilab I! It’s one of the first boards we made (circa 2001), and it’s always interesting to see how far we’ve come.