Altera

Altera Corporation is a manufacturer of programmable logic devices, headquartered in San Jose, California, with a primary focus on field-programmable gate array technology and system-on-a-chip FPGAs. It was founded in 1983 by the semiconductor veterans Robert Hartmann, Paul Newhagen, James Sansbury and Michael Magranet, who started with 1,300,000 dollars in seed money. The name was a play on the word alterable, describing the kind of chips the company created, and Rodney Smith was chosen as its first chief executive. Altera became a public company through an initial public offering in 1988. Its main product lines are the Agilex FPGAs and their predecessors, the high-end Stratix series, the mid-range Arria series and the lower-cost Cyclone series, together with the MAX series of non-volatile FPGAs. In December 2012 it announced the first shipments of Cyclone V SoC devices, which combine FPGA logic with a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor system on one chip. Intel acquired the company in 2015, the Altera name was re-established in 2024, and in 2025 it became a privately held company majority-owned by the private equity firm Silver Lake.