Xilinx: Pacific Crest Upgrades

Pacific Crest analyst Ruben Roy this morning raised his rating on Xilinx (XLNX) to Outperform from Sector Perform, noting that recent checks find the company is seeing increasing design wins for its Virtex 6 family of FPGAs, or field programmable gate arrays.

Xilinx said the company has gamed “meaningful design wins” at a large North American wireless handset company where it previously had not had any traction. He also says the company appears to have recovered lost share in a number of defense segment programs, which he says could benefit gross margins long term.

Roy notes that the stock looks cheap, at 10.7x calendar 2011 EPS estimates, versus 11.5x for Altera and 12.4x for the specialty semi group overall.

Roy sets a $33 target on the stock.

XLNX is up 34 cents, or 1.3%, to $24.12.