It's as if Wim Roelandts can't really believe his luck. The boy who could fix his family television set back in Belgium is now head of Xilinx, a company propelling electronics towards a new era. His enthusiasm seems boundless, and his 150 Irish staffers are ready for the fray.

Xilinx designs microchips but unlike, for example, the standard Intel chip, the Xilinx version can be rapidly reprogrammed using software supplied by the company. If the Intel chip is a fully-furnished home, the Xilinx one is an empty house.

This "programmable logic" doesn't suit everyone, but for businesses that need to change a production function fast, and perhaps change back again later, it allows a unique flexibility.

But the real benefit is still to come, Mr Roelandts believes. That will be when customers start to modify the chips in standard consumer items after they've bought them.

"What's going to happen is that, with the movement towards digital electronics, the ability to create new features is going to be so rapid that people won't be able to create equipment quickly enough. So we're going to move more and more towards the creation of universal equipment, which you can change and upgrade all the time," he says.

This will happen within five or 10 years, he forecasts.

"In other words, instead of buying a TV set, using it unchanged for a time, then throwing it away and buying a new one, you'll buy a TV set and then modify it over time, either for free or against payment, to get better pictures, sound or whatever.

"As soon as you're connected to a network, you can download new technology for your TV, thanks to our chips," he adds.

Such a development would spell the end of the era of planned obsolescence, of customers constantly worrying about buying a computer, a video or a sound system only to find out that it is a model destined about to be overtaken by something better, more powerful.

"This is probably the biggest mental change that is going to affect the electronics industry since the microprocessor," Mr Roelandts says. "All of the hardware engineers today have been educated with the concept that electronics is text - that once you design it, it's immovable, it doesn't change any more. But what we are saying is: `No that's no longer true'.

"I could give examples of how this will work, but how it will ultimately be used we don't know yet - no one does. And our imagination can probably only come up with 10 per cent of the possibilities once people start using it, like the microprocessor 20 years ago."

If he's right, and if Xilinx keeps its dominant position in its marketplace, the firm's Irish operation will be in the thick of it.

The company opened its plant at Dublin's Citywest business campus in February 1996 and is scheduled to have 300 employees by the end of the decade. Mr Roelandts says Xilinx came for the tax breaks and stayed for the graduates.

"We are very pleased with the quality of people we've found here; with their excitement, their motivation, their dedication to work. And that's why we're expanding here as quickly as our business conditions will allow."

Last month, the company took out an option on more land around its plant, and its Dublin executives quietly predict a significantly greater expansion than was originally planned.

The importance is not really the factory, Mr Roelandts adds. The company doesn't manufacture the chips itself, but designs and tests them, and the software to go with them. It does this at just two sites - Dublin and San Jose, California. Already, the leased telecommunications line to the US is the third busiest from Ireland, as the engineers on both sides of the Atlantic send billions of bits of data back and forth daily.

"I believe that, in the long term, development is more important than manufacturing. Development creates high-paid jobs, creates the need for a lot of services and, of course, creates worldwide products that themselves create manufacturing volume," says Mr Roelandts.

Another part of his attitude to the company has also made it attractive for Irish graduates; everyone who works there is a shareholder.

"Our whole philosophy is that if somebody joins Xilinx, they will be employed for the rest of their life with us. Not in the old paternalistic way. Our goal is to give that person challenges and opportunities either from a technical point of view or from a management point of view. We want to create the feeling that everyone has a part of the success; that they are partly owners."