Nine years after Intel acquired FPGA specialist Altera for $16.7 billion, it has spun it off into an independent company.

Intel recently announced that Altera will be spun off as a new FPGA company.

In the FPGA Vision webcast, CEO Sandra Rivera and COO Shannon Poulin revealed their strategy for securing leadership in a $55 billion+ market opportunity.

The strategy expands the company's portfolio, including the only FPGA with AI built into the fabric, and helps solve growing customer problems. Additionally, Altera was announced as a new company name.

“The FPGA market has an opportunity to revitalize as customers address increasingly complex technology challenges, differentiate themselves from competitors, and accelerate time to value,” said Sandra Rivera, CEO of Altera.

He stated, “We will lead the FPGA market by taking a bold, agile, and customer-centric approach to providing programmable solutions and usable AI technologies across a wide range of application areas, including communications, cloud, data center, embedded, industrial, automotive, and military aircraft markets.”

The newly independent Altera said it will effectively respond to the growth of the FPGA market across cloud, network, and edge, and support its conquest of related application areas through its best-in-class Quartus Prime software and enhanced AI capabilities.

The emergence of AI is creating new complexities and opportunities across all industries. Altera is capitalizing on these opportunities with its FPGA AI Suite and OpenVINO, which generates optimized IP based on standard frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch.

Altera FPGAs provide flexible solutions that better address evolving market requirements, including seamless integration of critical AI inference capabilities, and better leverage evolving standards such as PCI Express, CXL, Ethernet, and 6G wireless.

Altera's solutions are optimized for a wide range of markets and use cases, from networking and communications infrastructure to low-power embedded applications. Altera recently announced new products and services that address diverse customer needs.

Agilex 9 is in volume production and provides the industry's fastest data converters for radar and military aerospace applications that require high-bandwidth mixed-signal FPGAs.

The Agilex 7 F-Series and I-Series devices are now available for manufacturing and are described as delivering up to 2x the fabric performance per watt compared to competing FPGAs, making them ideal for high-bandwidth computing applications such as data centers, networking, and defense.

Agilex 5 is the only FPGA fabric with AI built-in, delivering 1.6x better performance per watt than competing products and supporting embedded and edge applications.

The soon-to-be-released Agilex 3 will offer a line of low-power FPGAs with low complexity functions, signaling their potential for use in cloud, communications, and intelligent edge applications.