Altera
Altera Corporation was a manufacturer of programmable logic devices (PLDs) headquartered in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1983 and acquired by Intel in 2015.
Headquarters in San Jose, California | |
| Industry | Integrated circuits |
|---|---|
| Founded | June 1983 |
| Defunct | December 28, 2015 |
| Fate | Acquired by Intel |
| Headquarters | San Jose, California, United States |
Key people | John P. Daane (Chairman, President, & CEO) Ronald J. Pasek (CFO) |
| 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) |
| Footnotes / references | |
The main product lines from Altera were the flagship Stratix series, mid-range Arria series, and lower-cost Cyclone series system on a chip field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs); the MAX series complex programmable logic device and non-volatile FPGAs; Quartus design software; and Enpirion PowerSoC DC-DC power solutions.
The company was founded in 1983 by semiconductor veterans Rodney Smith, Robert Hartmann, James Sansbury, and Paul Newhagen with $500,000 in seed money. The name of the company was a play on "alterable", the type of chips the company created. In 1984, the company formed a long-running design partnership with Intel, and 1988, became a public company via an initial public offering (IPO). In 1994, Altera acquired the PLD business of Intel for $50 million.
On December 28, 2015, the company was acquired by Intel and became the 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.