Altera
| Altera logo | |
| Company type | Public (Nasdaq: ALTR) |
|---|---|
| Industry | Integrated Circuits |
| Founded | 1983, public since 1989 |
| Headquarters | San Jose, CA |
Key people | John P. Daane, CEO |
| Products | FPGAs, CPLDs, Embedded Processors, Structured ASICs |
| Revenue | ~$1.28 billion/year |
Number of employees | ~2,600 |
| Website | www.altera.com |
Altera Corporation (Nasdaq: ALTR) is a leading manufacturer of programmable logic devices. It is a member of the NASDAQ-100 group of technology stocks and the S&P 500.
Altera is one of the pioneers of Programmable Logic, following notable early leaders Signetics and MMI in introducing PLDs. Altera develops many features that are geared towards system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) capability. Some of the more recent examples include embedded memory, embedded processors, and high-speed transceivers. The success in 130nm and 90nm product launches are good case studies. Altera's Nios II and Nios soft core processors and HardCopy II & HardCopy devices are extending Altera's reach in addressable markets, and put Altera in the world of embedded processors and structured ASICs respectively. Among its chief competitors are Xilinx, Lattice Semiconductor, Actel, Quicklogic and Atmel.
Altera also offers the software suite Quartus II, aimed at the design and simulation of logic circuits. Although their software suite extensively supports VHDL and Verilog as primary languages, Altera is the developer of the Hardware Description Language known as AHDL.
Device Family Lines
- MAX 3000A: EPM3032A,EPM3064A,EPM3128A,EPM3256A,EPM3512A
- MAX 7000: EPM7032B,EPM7064B,EPM7128B,EPM7256B,EPM7512B
- MAX II: EPM240,EPM570,EPM1270,EPM2210
- Stratix: announced February 11, 2002
- Stratix GX: announced November 4, 2002
- Stratix II: announced February 2, 2004
- Stratix II GX: announced October 24, 2005
- Stratix III: announced November 8, 2006
- Cyclone: announced September 23, 2002
- Cyclone II: announced June 28, 2004
- Cyclone III: announced March 19, 2007
- Arria GX: announced May 8, 2007
- HardCopy Stratix: announced February 4, 2002
- HardCopy II: announced January 24, 2005
Royalty-Free
- Nios II software embedded processor core.
Design Software Products
Competition
- Altera's major competitor are Xilinx and Lattice Semiconductor.
- Further notable Competitors in the field of FPGAs are Actel and QuickLogic.
While CPLDs and classic FPGAs were strictly Logic-Devices, with their newest devices the bigger FPGA-Vendors go more and more into high throughput Digital signal processing applications. This trend is also driven by the so called Electronic system level Design. It's not really new, but it is gathering momentum, not only in Marketing and PR like the last 10 Years, but in real use out in the Industry. With todays Multi-Million-Gate Devices and their System-on-a-chip-Architectures, and high-level synthesis tools combined with IP(-Reuse) one can implement complex systems competely in a single FPGA instead of using a large PCB with various chips and busses on it. So in the future Vendors like Altera and Xilinx will compete more and more with companies like Texas Instruments or Analog Devices.