Intel relaunches and renames its FPGA business

The unit began operating as a standalone business at the beginning of the year, and has now been officially named and launched. The announcement was made by the Altera CEO Sandra Rivera, and comes a few months after Intel first teased its plans to spin off its Programmble Solutions Group to better compete in the low-power programmable chip space. A field-programmable gate array is a type of configurable integrated circuit that is configured by the customer after it is manufactured. 

Rivera described FPGA as a “USD 55 billion-plus market opportunity.” Altera will be competing with AMD, which acquired FPGA firm Xilinx in February 2022, along with smaller firms such as Lattice Semiconductor. She outlined the following product roadmap. 

• Agilex 9 – now in volume production. Targeted at for radar and military-aerospace applications that require high-bandwidth mixed-signal FPGAs.
• Agilex 7 F-series and I-series devices – released to production. Tailored toward high-bandwidth compute applications like data centre, networking and defense.
• Agilex 5 – now broadly available. The only FPGA fabric infused with AI, best-in-class performance and 1.6x better performance per watt versus competing products. Geared toward embedded and edge applications.
• Coming soon: Agilex 3. A low-power line of FPGAs to low-complexity functions for cloud, communications and intelligent edge applications. 

“As customers deal with increasingly complex technological challenges and work to differentiate themselves from their competitors and accelerate time to value, we have an opportunity to reinvigorate the FPGA market,” Rivera said. “We’re leading with a bold, agile and customer-obsessed approach to deliver programmable solutions and accessible AI across a broad range of applications in the comms, cloud, data center, embedded, industrial, automotive and mil-aero market segments.” 

Intel acquired Altera Corporation in 2015 for USD 16.7 billion.