Austin graduated from UC Berkeley in 1974 and 1975 with his BS EECS in Electromagnetic (E&M) Theory and MS EECS in Communications and Information Theory. He worked in the telecommunications field for 20 years designing optical, microwave, and copper-based transmission systems. Austin joined the IC Design department for the Virtex product line at Xilinx in 1998. His role for the last four years is working for Xilinx Research Labs, where he is looking beyond the present technology issues. Austin has 69 patents.