Altera

Not to be confused withAltria GrouporAlterra Mountain Company.

Altera Corporation

Headquarters inSan Jose, California
Company type	Subsidiary
Industry	Integrated circuits
Founded	June 1983(June 1983)
Headquarters	San Jose, California,United States
Key people	Sandra L. Rivera (CEO)
Products	FPGAs CPLDs Embedded systems ASICs
Revenue	$1.932 billion (2014)
Net income	$472 million (2014)
Total assets	$5.674 billion (2014)
Total equity	$3.285 billion (2014)
Number of employees	3,091 (2014)
Parent	Intel
Website	altera
Footnotes / references

Altera Corporationis a manufacturer ofprogrammable logic devices(PLDs) headquartered inSan Jose, California.It was founded in 1983 and acquired byIntelin 2015 before becoming independent once again in 2024 as a company focused on development ofField-Programmable Gate Array(FPGA) technology andsystem on a chipFPGAs.

The company was founded in 1983 by semiconductor veterans Rodney Smith, Robert Hartmann, James Sansbury, and Paul Newhagen with $500,000 inseed money.The name of the company was a play on "alterable", the type of chips the company created. In 1988, Altera became apublic companyvia aninitial public offering(IPO).

On December 28, 2015, the company was acquired by Intel and became a newly formed business unit called Programmable Solutions Group (PSG).In October 2023, Intel announced it would be spinning off PSG into a separate company at the start of 2024, while maintaining majority ownership and intending to seek an IPO within three years.In February 2024, Intel announced that the newly independent company would reestablish the Altera name and branding.

Products

FPGAs

Cyclone III FPGA

FPGA Developer-board with Altera Cyclone V SE FPGA

Die shotof an Altera Max II FPGA

The main product lines from Altera are theAgilexFPGA product lines, and their predecessors: the high-endStratixseries, mid-range Arria series,and lower-cost Cyclone series; as well as the MAX series non-volatile FPGAs.

Semiconductor intellectual property cores

Altera and its partners offer an array ofsemiconductor intellectual property coresthat serve as building blocks that design engineers can drop into their system designs to perform specific functions. IP cores eliminate some of the time-consuming tasks of creating every block in a design from scratch. In 2000, Altera acquired Designpro and Northwest Logic, providers of IP cores, in order to expand its design capabilities and move towards delivery of complete system-on-chip solutions.

System on a chip FPGAs

Beginning in December 2012, the company announced the shipment of its firstsystem on a chipFPGA devices using a fully depleted silicon on insulator (FDSOI) 28nm chip manufacturing process. These are the Cyclone V SoC devices, which have a dual-coreARM architectureCortex-A9 processor system with FPGA logic on a single chip.These devices integrated FPGAs with full hard processor systems based aroundARM architectureonto a single device.As of 2024, the majority of Altera's FPGA devices are available as an SoC variant with an ARM hard processor system integrated with the FPGA as a single system on a chip.

These SoCs are targeted for use in wireless communications, industrial, video surveillance, automotive and medical equipment markets. With these SoCs devices, users were able to create custom field-programmable SoC variants for power, board space, performance and cost optimization.

Cyclone V SoC, Arria V SoC and Arria 10 SoC product families are system on a chip FPGAs based upon a hardARM Cortex-A9dual-core processor system.

Stratix 10 SoC and Agilex 7 SoC product families are system on a chip FPGAs based upon a hardARM Cortex-A53quad-core processor system.

The Agilex 5 SoC product family are system on a chip FPGAs based upon a hardARM Cortex-A76/A55quad-core processor system.

Soft Processor cores

Altera offers theNios Vembedded soft processor cores based on theRISC-Vinstruction set architecture. Previously Altera had offered their own proprietaryNios IIembedded soft processor, the FreescaleColdFirev1 core, and theARM Cortex-M1processor.

Design software

Main article:Intel Quartus Prime

All of Altera's devices are supported by a common design environment, theQuartus Primedesign software, which is a multi-platform development environment that includes various tools needed to design FPGAs, SoC FPGAs, and CPLDs.

In May 2013, Altera made available SDK for OpenCL, enabling software programmers to access the high-performance capabilities of programmable logic devices.

Altera also support high-level synthesis usingSYCLextensions to ANSI C/C++.

Intel Partnership, Acquisition and Ownership

In 1984, the company formed a long-running design partnership withIntel.In 1994, Altera acquired the PLD business of Intel for $50 million.

Intel 14-nm technology

In February 2013, Altera announced an agreement to useIntel'sfoundryservices to produce its 14-nm node for the future manufacturing of its FPGAs, based on Intel's 14-nm tri-gate transistor technology, in place of Altera's ongoing agreement withTSMC.The Stratix 10 product family was the first such product line.

Acquisition and Ownership by Intel

In December 2015,Intelacquired Altera for $16.7 billion in cash.Altera became Intel's newly formed business unit called the Programmable Solutions Group (PSG).

In October 2023, Intel announced it would be spinning off PSG into a separate company at the start of 2024, while maintaining majority ownership and intending to seek an IPO within three years.In February 2024, Intel announced that the newly independent company would reestablish the Altera name and branding.

Restatement of financial results

On June 21, 2006, after an investigation by theU.S. Securities and Exchange Commission,the company restated its financial results from 1996 to 2005 to correct accounting errors related tooptions backdating.Thechief financial officerof the company resigned.Altera filed a petition to overturn related regulations but was, under Intel, denied in 2020.

See also

• Xilinx
• Intel
• AMD