10 Facts About Altera

Altera Corporation was a manufacturer of programmable logic devices headquartered in San Jose, California.

Main product lines from Altera were the flagship Stratix series, mid-range Arria series, and lower-cost Cyclone series system on a chip field-programmable gate arrays ; the MAX series complex programmable logic device and non-volatile FPGAs; Quartus design software; and Enpirion PowerSoC DC-DC power solutions.

In May 2013, Altera made available SDK for OpenCL, enabling software programmers to access the high-performance capabilities of programmable logic devices.

In May 2013, Altera acquired embedded power chipmaker Enpirion for approximately $140 million in cash, providing Altera with power system on a chip DC-DC converters that enabled greater power densities and lower noise performance compared with their discrete equivalent.

Altera offered soft processor cores on the Nios II embedded processor, the Freescale ColdFire v1 core, and the ARM Cortex-M1 processor as well as a hard IP processor core on the ARM Cortex-A9 processor.

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All of Altera's devices were supported by a common design environment, Quartus II design software.

In May 2008, Altera introduced the first 40-nm programmable logic devices: the Stratix IV FPGAs and HardCopy IV ASICs.

Altera's devices were manufactured using techniques such as 193-nm immersion lithography and technologies such as extreme low-k dielectrics and strained silicon.

Altera developed a user-friendly method for partial reconfiguration, so core functionality can be changed easily and on the fly.

Altera filed a petition to overturn related regulations but was denied in 2020.