Altera Information & Altera Links at HealthHaven.com

Altera
Type	Public (NASDAQ: ALTR)
Founded	1983, public since 1989
Headquarters	San Jose, CA, USA
Key people	John P. Daane, CEO
Industry	Integrated Circuits
Products	FPGAs, CPLDs, Embedded Processors, ASICs
Revenue	$1.37 billion/year (2008)
Employees	2,760 (Dec. 2008)
Website	www.altera.com

Altera headquarters in San Jose

Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) is a major manufacturer of high-end PLDs (programmable logic devices). The company invented the first reprogrammable logic device in 1984^[1]. PLDs can be reprogrammed during the design cycle as well as in the field to perform multiple functions, and they support a fairly fast design process. Altera's main products are the Cyclone, Arria GX and Stratix series of FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), the MAX series of CPLDs (complex programmable logic devices), the HardCopy series of ASICs (ASIC) and Quartus II software.

The Stratix series FPGAs are larger, faster devices, with more features than the Cyclone series devices. They also cost more. The GX parts contain dedicated high-speed serial transceivers.

The Cyclone and Arria series FPGAs are lower cost, smaller devices meant for less demanding applications. Arria series FPGAs are also available with integrated transceivers.

A 'Flex EPF10K20' FPGA (an Altera product)

[edit] ASICs

Altera offers a design flow based on HardCopy ASICs, which transitions the FPGA design, once finalized, to a form which is not alterable, in order to lower design security risks and also costs for higher volume production. Design engineers could prototype their designs in Stratix series FPGAs, and then migrate these designs to HardCopy ASICs when they're ready for volume production.

The unique design flow makes hardware/software co-design and co-verification possible. It also helps design engineers deliver their systems to market 9 to 12 months faster, on average, than with standard-cell solutions. They can employ a single RTL, set of intellectual property (IP) cores, and Quartus II design software for both FPGA and ASIC implementations. Altera's HardCopy Design Center manages test insertion.^[2]

[edit] 40-nm Technology

In May 2008, Altera introduced the industry's first 40-nm programmable logic devices: the Stratix IV FPGAs and HardCopy IV ASICs. Both devices are available with integrated transceiver options. Since then, the company has also introduced Stratix IV GT FPGAs, which have 11.3-Gbps transceivers for 40G/100G applications, and Arria II GX FPGAs, which have 3.75-Gbps transceivers for power- and cost-sensitive applications.

Semiconductors manufactured on a 40-nm process node address many of the industry's key challenges, including power consumption, device performance, and cost. Altera's devices are manufactured using techniques such as 193-nm immersion lithography and technologies such as extreme low-k dielectrics and strained silicon. These techniques and technologies bring enhancements to device performance and power efficiency.

[edit] IP Cores

Altera and its partners offer an array of intellectual property (IP) cores that serve as building blocks that design engineers can drop into their system designs to perform specific functions. IP cores eliminate some of the time-consuming tasks of creating every block in a design from scratch. Altera and partner IP cores are optimized for Altera programmable logic devices.

[edit] Royalty-Free

Nios II software embedded processor core.
ColdFire v1 core (free for Cyclone III).

[edit] Design Software Products

Quartus II design software
SOPC Builder, a tool in Quartus II software that eliminates manual system integration tasks by automatically generating interconnect logic and creating a testbench to verify functionality
DSP Builder, a tool that creates a seamless bridge between the MATLAB/Simulink tool and Quartus II software, so FPGA designers have the algorithm development, simulation, and verification capabilities of MATLAB/Simulink system-level design tools
MAX+PLUS II
MAX+PLUS II BASELINE
A+Plus
Sam+Plus

[edit] Competition

Altera's largest competitor is FPGA founder and market-share leader Xilinx, who has been a long-time rival of Altera.^[3]

The two companies closest competitor is Lattice Semiconductor, who represents less than ten percent of the market.^[3]

Other FPGA makers, Actel and QuickLogic, sell to a lower-end market segment that Altera mostly does not address.

In broader terms, Altera competes with ASIC, Structured ASIC, and Zero Mask-Charge ASIC companies like eASIC. In recent times, FPGAs and Structured ASICs have become powerful enough to compete head-to-head with DSP (digital signal processor) devices, microcontrollers, and virtually every other embedded product. Moore's Law and improving software tools are rapidly expanding FPGAs' potential markets.

[edit] References

^ Source: ["Key Companies Shake Up This Year's Top Employers, Electronic Design][1]
^ Altera Product Catalog, January 2009
^ ^a ^b John Edwards, EDN. “No room for Second Place.” June 1, 2006. Retrieved January 15, 2009.

[edit] External links

Companies portal

[0] Source: ["Key Companies Shake Up This Year's Top Employers, Electronic Design][1]

[1] Altera Product Catalog, January 2009

[xilinx-2] John Edwards, EDN. “No room for Second Place.” June 1, 2006. Retrieved January 15, 2009.

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