Company profile

Founded in Silicon Valley in 1983 and headquartered in San Jose, California. In 1984 it introduced the world's first programmable, erasable and reprogrammable logic device. Intel acquired Altera for USD 16.7 billion in December 2015. On 1 March 2024 Intel announced the establishment of Altera as a fully independent FPGA company. On 14 April 2025 Intel sold 51% of the Altera business to Silver Lake, retaining the remaining 49%. Business scope: R&D and production of programmable logic devices and solutions.

Application areas

  • Artificial intelligence: edge AI across industrial, medical, test and measurement, aerospace, defence and broadcast applications. The Agilex 7 FPGA M series enables custom-transformer based LLM inference, outperforming GPUs in power and size.
  • Wired communications: the foundation for efficient transport solutions from 100Gbps to more than 1Tbps, with built-in blocks such as forward error correction (FEC) for Ethernet, Fibre Channel and FlexO/FlexE.
  • Wireless communications: SoC FPGA delivers best-in-class performance per watt, enabling differentiated radio functionality and intelligence.
  • Automotive electronics: parallel processing, low latency and customisable design enhance automotive applications, suit sensor fusion, enable efficient real-time data processing and reduce energy through dynamic reconfiguration, while providing flexible hardware that complies with ISO 26262 and ISO/SAE 21434.
  • Military, aerospace and government: reprogrammability lets defence systems adapt quickly to new threats and protocols without changing hardware, with built-in encryption and anti-tampering for bandwidth-intensive tasks such as radar processing and signal intelligence at low power.
  • Industrial: in smart energy, higher performance, flexibility, real-time processing, energy efficiency and enhanced security support efficient, reliable and smart energy systems; robotics benefits include low latency, functional safety, deterministic computing and connectivity, supporting both static and mobile robots and enabling intelligent decision-making, predictive maintenance and adaptive control.
  • Test and measurement: communications testing for wireless (WiMAX, WiFi) and wired (Ethernet) testers, fibre optic testers and legacy telecom field test sets; digital, analog/RF, mixed-signal, memory and SoC test sets; and general testing with oscilloscopes, signal generators and analysers, logic analysers, multimeters, counters and automotive testers.
  • Broadcast and professional AV: deterministic, ultra-low-latency performance for live production and content delivery. The reconfigurable architecture lets broadcasters and AV professionals update systems for new codecs, resolutions and features without replacing hardware, handling HD, 4K, 8K and 16K streams and supporting IP-based video transport (SMPTE ST 2110).
  • Medical electronics: FPGAs let AI algorithms quickly analyse endoscopy, X-ray, CT/PET, MRI and other imaging data and give clinicians immediate feedback, supporting AI-driven patient analysis, personalised treatment and localised AI processing for lower latency and stronger privacy.

Product categories

  • FPGA and SoC FPGA families: the Agilex portfolio, including Agilex 9, 7, 5 and 3 FPGA and SoC FPGA devices for a wide range of applications.
  • Stratix series: Stratix 10 FPGA and SoC FPGA combine high density, high performance and rich features to maximise system bandwidth for the most demanding applications.
  • Arria series: Arria 10 and Arria V FPGA and SoC FPGA deliver best-in-class mid-range performance and efficiency, with rich memory, logic and DSP resources and strong transceiver signal integrity.
  • Cyclone series: Cyclone 10, Cyclone V and Cyclone IV FPGA and SoC FPGA devices for low-power, low-cost designs that accelerate time to market.
  • CPLD series: MAX 10 FPGA, MAX V CPLD and the MAX CPLD family with instant-on, non-volatile architecture and low on-chip power consumption.