Date: 26/02/2013

Lucky Altera gets foundry service from Intel for making 14nm FPGA

The first in the Q of advanced semiconductor foundries for availing services on smallest nodes are mostly FPGA makers. The node matters more for FPGA, because of power saving and integration. At 14nm, FPGAs may even get into mobile phones. The top two FPGA companies Xilinx and Altera are closely competing in most aspects of FPGA technology. Until now both got same resources, but from now onwards Altera is gaining node advantage over Xilinx. Intel has agreed to make FPGA chips for Altera at 14nm node.

Being ahead in 14nm node give a significant advantage to Altera. FPGAs are heavily used in telecom and computing infrastructure. John Daane, president, CEO and chairman of Altera says his company gets tremendous competitive advantage at the high end in that we are the only major FPGA company with access to this technology.

What if Intel makes System In Package (SiP) devices or 3D IC chips/cubes using both Altera FPGA and its own x86 processors? So that becomes programmable processors in package. Highly possible, and an excellent strategy to beat pure foundries and pure processor companies.

Altera also announced in other release, where it says it maintains good partnership with TSMC for its present 28nm FPGA chips.
Author: Srinivasa Reddy N