When Altera, the FPGA maker owned by Intel, picked this week to hold its Altera Innovators Day in San Jose, California, it probably did not think its new product news would be competing for attention with rumors about the potential sale of Intel to Qualcomm, but here we are.
Though an outright acquisition of Intel by Qualcomm appears unlikely, it cast a shadow over this week’s developers’ conference and Altera CEO Sandra Rivera’s discussion of Altera's progress toward becoming a standalone firm, as well as Altera's sharing of new details about the planned line of low-power, low-cost Agilex 3 FPGAs, and its unveiling of new development kits and software for the organization's Agilex 5 FPGAs.
Rivera, speaking in an online briefing with analysts and media prior to the event, provided an update on Altera’s efforts to move forward with Intel’s plan for Altera to become an independent firm. She said that since last February, when Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group officially re-branded as Altera, the business has been busy “decoupling” itself from Intel general and administrative (G&A) systems, such as human resources, IT, finance, legal, and other corporate services. “What comes next... is as of January 1, 2025, we will be done with all of that decoupling, if you will, from Intel, and we will be operating completely standalone on with our own G&A functions. Our focus then is really on how we continue to build our pipeline and convert design wins.”
As for the new product news from Altera Innovators Day, Rivera delved into how the Agilex 3 FPGAs will bring higher levels of integration, enhanced security, and higher performance in a smaller package–with densities ranging from 25K-135K logic elements–to embedded and intelligent edge applications. Agilex 3 FPGAs feature an on-chip dual Cortex A55 ARM hard processor subsystem with a programmable fabric infused with AI capabilities to support real-time compute for time-sensitive intelligent edge applications like autonomous vehicles and industrial IoT. The new FPGAs also allow for the seamless integration of sensors, drivers, actuators and machine learning algorithms used in smart factory automation technologies like machine vision and robotics
In terms of security, the Agilex 3 FPGAs bitstream encryption, authentication, and physical anti-tamper detection, all upgrades over previous-generation Agilex devices that better position the FPGAs for defense and industrial automation use cases.
The performance upgrades in this series come courtesy of Altera’s HyperFlex architecture, which enables a 1.9x1 performance improvement over the previous generation of FPGAs, and high clock frequencies despite the low-power, low-cost profile of the new devices. Additional system performance is achieved through integrated high-speed transceivers operating up to 12.5 Gbps and added support for LPDDR4 memory, according to Altera.
“It’s a lot of function and a lot of punch in a small device,” Rivera said, adding that production shipments and development kits for the Agilex 3 FPGAs are expected to start in the middle of 2025, with software support ready in the first quarter of next year.
Meanwhile, regarding software support for the Agilex 5 family, Altera also announced the features offered in its newest release of its Quartus Prime Pro design software, which the company said developers can use to start designing Agilex 5 FPGA D-series. Quartus Prime Pro 24.3 unlocks more devices within the Agilex portfolio and enables improved support for embedded applications. Also, Altera offers software support for its Agilex 5 FPGA E-series through a no-cost license in the Quartus Prime Software, which the company says will help to lower the barriers to entry for Altera’s mid-range FPGA family.
The new software release also includes support for embedded applications that employ either an integrated hard-processor subsystem or Altera’s RISC-V solution, the Nios V soft-core processor that can be instantiated in the FPGA fabric. Altera and its ecosystem partners also announced 11 new Agilex 5 FPGA-based development kits and system-on-modules, joining a broad collection of Agilex 5 and Agilex 7 FPGA-based solutions available to help developers get started.
All of these efforts seem to tie directly into Rivera’s stated intention to “convert design wins” and help developers get their own new products into the market faster. That aggressiveness is not surprising for a new standalone company looking to emerge from the shadow of a troubled corporate owner whose own future remains in question.