Intel’s Altera spinout launches FPGA products, software

Altera – Intel’s standalone company focused on FPGA hardware – introduced an array of FPGA hardware, software, and services at its annual developer conference.

Nine months ago, Intel spun out Altera as a separate company with its own balance sheet and its own CEO: Sandra Rivera, a longtime Intel executive. In announcing the new Agilex products, Rivera reflected on the last nine months of progress. Much of the effort has been spent decoupling business functions from Intel, such as accounting, HR, corporate, legal, and other operations.

“Our goal is to be the number one FPGA solutions provider in the world. It’s a big, audacious, ambitious goal, but it’s the right goal for us, since we’re the only company left in the world that is top to bottom, cloud to edge,” she said on a conference call with journalists.

On the product front, Altera disclosed new details about its next-generation, power- and cost-optimized Agilex 3 FPGAs, which are the low-end, low-power products in the Agilex family. It also announced new development kits and software support for its Agilex 5 FPGAs.

The Agilex 3 FPGAs are engineered to meet the power, performance, and size demands of embedded and intelligent edge applications. They use Altera’s HyperFlex architecture found in other Altera products to provide a 1.9x performance improvement over the previous generation. 

Compared to the previous generation, Agilex 3 FPGAs offer greater integration, improved security, and enhanced performance in a compact form factor, with densities ranging from 25K to 135K logic elements.

The Agilex 3 FPGAs feature an integrated dual-core ARM Cortex-A55 hard processor subsystem, combined with a programmable fabric enhanced with AI capabilities. Designed for intelligent edge applications, these FPGAs enable real-time computing for time-sensitive tasks, such as autonomous vehicles and industrial IoT systems.

For smart factory automation technologies like machine vision and robotics, Agilex 3 FPGAs allow for the integration of sensors, drivers, actuators, and machine-learning algorithms. They also add several security enhancements, including bitstream encryption, authentication, and physical anti-tamper detection.

Altera also announced the latest features in its Quartus Prime Pro software development toolkit for rapid application development. Quartus Prime Pro 24.3 supports the new Agilex 5 FPGA D-series, which target an even broader range of edge applications compared to the current Agilex 5 FPGA E-series.

The software update 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 partners announced 11 new Agilex 5 FPGA-based development kits and system-on-modules (SoMs), joining a broad collection of Agilex 5 and Agilex 7 FPGA-based solutions available to help developers get started.

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