Altera

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Altera <tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align:center; padding:16px 0 16px 0;"></td></tr>
Type	Public (NASDAQ: ALTR)
Founded	1983, public since 1989
Headquarters	San Jose, CA <tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Key people</th><td>Unknown</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Industry</th><td>Integrated Circuits</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Products</th><td>FPGAs, CPLDs, Embedded Processors, Structured ASICs</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Revenue</th><td>~$1.12 billion/year</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Employees</th><td>~2,000</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Website</th><td>www.altera.com</td></tr>

Image:Alteraheadquarters.jpg

Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) is a leading manufacturer of programmable logic devices. It is a member of the NASDAQ-100 group of technology stocks and the S&P 500.

Altera is one of the pioneers of Programmable Logic, following notable early leaders Signetics and MMI in introducing PLDs. Altera develops many features that are geared towards system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) capability. Some of the more recent examples include embedded memory, embedded processors, and high-speed transceivers. Altera is famous for its operational excellence. The success in 130nm and 90nm product launches are good case studies. Altera's Nios II and Nios soft core processors and HardCopy II & HardCopy devices are extending Altera's reach in addressable markets, and put Altera in the world of embedded processors and structured ASICs respectively. Among its chief competitors are Xilinx, Lattice Semiconductor, Actel, Quicklogic and Atmel.

Altera also offers the software suite Quartus II, aimed at the design and simulation of logic circuits. Although their software suite extensively supports VHDL and Verilog as primary languages, Altera is the developer of the Hardware Description Language known as AHDL.