Altera

Altera Corporation

Altera headquarters in San Jose, California.
Type	Subsidiary of Intel
Industry	Integrated circuits
Founded	1983
Headquarters	San Jose, California, United States
Key people	John Daane (CEO) Dan McNamara (Intel PSG leader)
Products	FPGAs, CPLDs, Embedded Processors, ASICs
Revenue	US$ 1.783 billion (2013)
Operating income	US$584.1 million (2013)
Net income	US$556.8 million (2013)
Total assets	US$4.658 billion (2013)
Total equity	US$3.333 billion (2013)
Number of employees	2,884 (December 2011)
Parent	Intel
Website	www.altera.com

Altera Corporation is an Intel-owned American manufacturer of programmable logic devices (PLDs), reconfigurable complex digital circuits. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel. Altera released its first PLD in 1984. Altera's main products are the Stratix, Arria and Cyclone series FPGAs, the MAX series CPLDs,Quartus II design software, and Enpirion PowerSoC DC-DC power solutions.

Altera and Intel announced on June 1, 2015 that they have agreed that Intel would acquire Altera in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $16.7 billion. As of December 28, 2015, the acquisition had been completed.

The Stratix series FPGAs are the company's largest, highest bandwidth devices, with up to 1.1 million logic elements, integrated transceivers at up to 28 Gbit/s, up to 1.6 Tbit/s of serial switching capability, up to 1,840 GMACs of signal-processing performance, and up to 7 x72 DDR3 memory interfaces at 800 MHz. Cyclone series FPGAs and SoC FPGAs are the company's lowest cost, lowest power FPGAs, with variants offering integrated transceivers up to 5 Gbit/s. In between these two device families are Arria series FPGAs, which provide a balance of performance, power, and cost for mid-range applications such as remote radio heads, video conferencing equipment, and wireline access equipment. Arria FPGAs have integrated transceivers up to 10 Gbit/s.

Since December 2012, the company has been shipping SoC FPGA devices. According to Altera, fully depleted silicon on insulator (FDSOI) chip manufacturing process is beneficial for FPGAs. These devices integrate FPGAs with full hard processor systems based around ARM processors onto a single device.

In May 2013, Altera acquired embedded power chipmaker Enpirion for $134m in cash ($141m including the assumption of debt). Since that time, Enpirion has been incorporated into Altera by becoming its own product offering within the Altera portfolio of products. The Enpirion products are power system-on-a-chip DC-DC converters that enable greater power densities and lower noise performance compared with their discrete equivalent. Unlike converters made from discrete components Enpirion dc-dc converters are simulated, characterized, validated and production qualified at delivery.