FPGA company Altera is having a heck of a time (re)establishing its own identity. Acquired by Intel 10 years ago, the San Jose, California, company was spun off again as a separate, but still Intel-owned firm this past January. Since then questions have persisted about whether or not it will continue on a path toward an IPO or change ownership once again, with Intel rumored to have been talking to private equity firms about selling a majority stake in Altera.
Amid this uncertainty, Altera is doing its best to focus on the business at hand: Finding new ways to seize share in an FPGA market that should see strong growth in the coming years, but largely remains up for grabs. Altera’s latest effort came at this week’s Embedded World event, where the company provided an update on its newest Agilex FPGAs and software aimed at edge devices and applications, a portion of the market requiring a low-power, low-cost touch.
Specifically, Altera CEO Sandra Rivera stated in a presentation shared with Fierce Electronics that the company’s Agilex 3 FPGAs are “orderable today” and that its Agilex 5 E-Series FPGAs are now in shipping in “high-volume production.” Both of these device families have been configured to bring high-performance capabilities to low-power, cost-optimized applications that also demand low latency, such as in robotics or smart factory settings.
For example, for robot control systems, Agilex 3 FPGAs bring real-time control to multi-axis robot arms by fusing machine learning capabilities into multi-sensor pipelines, according to Altera. Meanwhile, in smart factory cameras, Agilex 3 FPGAs improve defect detection by using fine-grained parallel processing and CNNs trained for object recognition to analyze vast amounts of data, the company said.
The FPGAs are accompanied by Altera’s Quartus Prime Pro software, and FPGA AI Suite to spur fast development of customized embedded systems for those edge applications, as well as for medical devices.
While Intel and AMD mostly have played in higher-end data center applications for FPGAs, the lower end of the market has been claimed by the likes of Lattice Semiconductor and Microchip Technology, among others. But the so-called intelligent edge opportunity, characterized by more edge AI and on-device AI processing could be where much of the future growth comes from, according to Yole Group and others that have studied the sector. Altera is not alone in focusing more of its energy on this opportunity, as AMD also has made overtures with recent new product launches.
Regarding the Agilex 5 E-Series, Rivera’s presentation also showed that they are more optimized than the previous D-Series for more power-sensitive applications that require high-performance with smaller form factors and logic densities. In addition, Altera is expanding MAX 10 FPGA with high I/O density package options, including MAX 10 10M40 and 10M50 product lines that are now offered in variable-pitch ball grid array packages that reduce the form factor while maintaining a high IO count, lowering cost in the process. Samples can be ordered now, with production silicon available in Q3 2025.