 | |
 Altera Headquarters inSan Jose, California in 2025 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Nasdaq: ALTR (until 2015) | |
| Industry | Integrated circuits |
| Founded | June 1983; 42 years ago (1983-06) |
| Founders | Robert Hartmann, Paul Newhagen, James Sansbury, Michael Magranet |
| Headquarters | San Jose, California, United States |
Key people | Raghib Hussain (CEO) |
| Products | FPGAs, CPLDs, Embedded systems, ASICs |
| Revenue |  $1.932 billion (2014) |
| $472 million (2014) | |
| Total assets |  $5.674 billion (2014) |
| Total equity | $3.285 billion (2014) |
Number of employees | 3,091 (2014) |
| Parent | Silver Lake (51%)[1] Intel (49%) |
| Website | altera |
| Footnotes / references [2] | |
Altera Corporation is a manufacturer ofprogrammable logic devices (PLDs) headquartered inSan Jose, California. It was founded in 1983 and acquired byIntel in 2015 before becoming independent once again in 2025 as a company focused on development offield-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology andsystem on a chip FPGAs.
The company was founded in 1983 by semiconductor veterans Robert Hartmann, Paul Newhagen, James Sansbury, and Michael Magranet with $1,300,000 inseed money. The name of the company was a play on "alterable", the type of chips the company created. The founders selected Rodney Smith to be the company's first CEO.[3] In 1988, Altera became apublic company via aninitial public offering (IPO).[4]
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The main product lines from Altera are theAgilex FPGA product lines, and their predecessors: the high-endStratix series, mid-range Arria series,[5] and lower-cost Cyclone series; as well as the MAX series non-volatile FPGAs.
Altera and its partners offer an array ofsemiconductor intellectual property cores that 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.[6][7]
Beginning in December 2012, the company announced the shipment of its firstsystem on a chip FPGA devices using a fully depletedsilicon on insulator (FDSOI) 28 nm chip manufacturing process. These are the Cyclone V SoC devices, which have a dual-coreARM architecture Cortex-A9 processor system with FPGA logic on a single chip.[8] These devices integrated FPGAs with full hard processor systems based around ARM architecture onto a single device.[9][10] 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.[11]
Cyclone V SoC, Arria V SoC and Arria 10 SoC product families are system on a chip FPGAs based upon a hardARM Cortex-A9 dual-core processor system.
Stratix 10 SoC and Agilex 7 SoC product families are system on a chip FPGAs based upon a hardARM Cortex-A53 quad-core processor system.
The Agilex 5 SoC product family are system on a chip FPGAs based upon a hardARM Cortex-A76/A55 quad-core processor system.
Altera offers theNios V embedded soft processor cores based on theRISC-V instruction set architecture. Previously Altera had offered their own proprietaryNios II embedded soft processor, the FreescaleColdFire v1 core, and theARM Cortex-M1 processor.
All of Altera's devices are supported by a common design environment, theQuartus Prime design software, which is a multi-platform development environment that includes various tools needed to design FPGAs, SoC FPGAs, and CPLDs.[12][13]
In May 2013, Altera made available an SDK for OpenCL, enabling software programmers to access the high-performance capabilities of programmable logic devices.[14]
Altera also supports high-level synthesis usingSYCL extensions to ANSI C/C++.
In 1984, the company formed a partnership withIntel, licensing its programmable logic technology to Intel.[15] In 1994, Altera acquired the PLD business of Intel for $50 million.[16]
In February 2013, Altera announced an agreement to useIntel'sfoundry services 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.[17] The Stratix 10 product family was the first such product line.[18]
In December 2015,Intel acquired Altera for $16.7 billion in cash.[19][20] Altera became Intel's newly formed business unit called the Programmable Solutions Group (PSG).[21]
In October 2023, Intel announced that at the start of 2024 it would begin a process of spinning off PSG into a separate company, while maintaining majority ownership and intending to seek anIPO within three years.[22][23] In February 2024, Intel announced that the newly independent company would reestablish the Altera name and branding,[24] and on January 1, 2025, Altera officially became an independent subsidiary of Intel.[25][26]
On April 14, 2025, Intel announced that they agreed to sell a 51% controlling stake toSilver Lake, a private equity firm.[27][28] With this sale, Intel also cancelled their plan to conduct an IPO for the Altera business, since the majority stake is now owned by Silver Lake. It was announced that Raghib Hussain will replace Sandra Rivera as the chief executive officer of Altera, with an effective date of May 5, 2025.[29]
On September 15, 2025, Altera announced that Silver Lake completed the acquisition of a 51% stake in the company, while Intel holds the remaining 49%.[30]
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 officer of the company resigned.[31][32][33] Altera filed a petition to overturn related regulations but was, under Intel, denied in 2020.[34]
