Intel completed its previously announced acquisition of Altera, a provider of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology.
Altera will operate as a new Intel business unit called the Programmable Solutions Group (PSG), led by Altera veteran Dan McNamara. Intel said it is committed to a smooth transition for Altera customers and will continue the support and future product development of Altera’s many products, including FPGA, ARM-based SoC and power products. In addition to strengthening the existing FPGA business, PSG will work closely with Intel’s Data Center Group and IoT Group to deliver the next generation of highly customized, integrated products and solutions.
“Altera is now part of Intel, and together we will make the next generation of semiconductors not only better but able to do more,” said Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO. “We will apply Moore’s Law to grow today’s FPGA business, and we’ll invent new products that make amazing experiences of the future possible – experiences like autonomous driving and machine learning.”
Intel to Acquire Altera for its Programmable Logic Devices
Intel agreed to acquire Altera a for $54 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $16.7 billion.
Altera, which is based in San Jose, California, offers programmable logic, process technologies, IP cores and development tools . Its portfolio includes its Stratix series FPGAs with embedded memory, digital signal processing (DSP) blocks, high-speed transceivers, and high-speed I/O pins. Altera’s Arria system-on-chip solutions integrate an ARM-based hard processor and memory interfaces with the FPGA fabric using a high-bandwidth interconnect. These devices include additional hard logic such as PCI Express Gen2, multiport memory controllers, error correction code (ECC), memory protection and high-speed serial transceivers.
Altera had 2014 revenue of $1.9 billion, of which 44% of sales were for telecom/wireless, 22% for industrial/military/automotive, and 16% for networking/computer/storage. Altera holds about 39% market share of the PLD segment compared to 49% for Xilinx. The company was founded in 1983 and has approximately 3,000 employees.
“Intel’s growth strategy is to expand our core assets into profitable, complementary market segments,” said Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel. “With this acquisition, we will harness the power of Moore’s Law to make the next generation of solutions not just better, but able to do more. Whether to enable new growth in the network, large cloud data centers or IoT segments, our customers expect better performance at lower costs. This is the promise of Moore’s Law and it’s the innovation enabled by Intel and Altera joining forces.”
“Given our close partnership, we’ve seen firsthand the many benefits of our relationship with Intel—the world’s largest semiconductor company and a proven technology leader, and look forward to the many opportunities we will have together,” said John Daane, President, CEO and Chairman of Altera. “We believe that as part of Intel we will be able to develop innovative FPGAs and system-on-chips for our customers in all market segments.”
- In February 2013, Altera announced that its next generation FPGAs will be based on Intel’s 14 nm tri-gate transistor technology. These next-generation products target ultra high-performance systems for military, wireline communications, cloud networking, and compute and storage applications. Under a partnership deal announced by the firms, Altera’s next-generation products will now include 14 nm, in addition to previously announced 20 nm technologies.
