Altera
| Altera Corporation
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| legal form | Corporation |
| founding | 1983 |
| resolution | 2015 |
| Reason for dissolution | Takeover by Intel |
| Seat |
San Jose , United States
|
| management | John P. Daane, Chief Executive Officer |
| Number of employees | 2,666 (December 2010) |
| sales | $ 1.954 billion (2010) |
| Branch | semiconductor |
| Website | www.altera.com |
The Altera Corporation was an independent manufacturer of ASICs and programmable integrated circuits ( PLDs and FPGAs ) and was founded 1983rd He has been part of Intel since the end of 2015 ,
history
Altera was the main competitor of the Xilinx company for many years and was particularly successful because of the cheaper modules and the software used for programming.
As a fabless company, Altera focused primarily on the development of circuits and intellectual property (IP) based on hardware description languages such as VHDL or Verilog . In the area of production, the company worked with various chip manufacturers. The main cooperation partner was Intel.
The company was listed in the S&P 500 share index.
On June 1, 2015, Intel announced that it would take over Altera for $ 16.7 billion. The acquisition was completed on December 29, 2015.
Thanks to the integration into the Intel company, it is now the sole producer and distributor of the technology.
Products
The most important products are the programmable components of the Stratix , Cyclone and later Arria and MAX10 series . These are FPGAs into which complex switching structures and entire processor systems (Nios II Embedded Processor) can be programmed as SoCs with the help of the in-house EDA software Quartus , MAX-Plus, SOPC Builder and DSP Builder .
Similar to the components of the competitors, FPGAs from Altera also have internal microprocessors implemented in hardware. So are in the Cyclone 5 z. B. ARM processors available.
The MAX®II CPLDs are available for simpler applications .
For ASIC applications, the so-called HardCopy ASICs are available, an Altera-specific method that transfers the circuit structure of the FPGAs generated from the design description directly into an ASIC .
Market situation
The main competitor is Xilinx . Other important competitors include Lattice and Actel (now Microsemi ).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Altera Corporation: Annual Report 2010. (PDF) Retrieved on March 31, 2011 (English).
- ↑ Intel to buy Altera for $ 16.7B as chipmakers consolidate. CNET, June 1, 2015, accessed December 11, 2015 .