Altera Corporation is a manufacturer of programmable logic devices (PLDs) headquartered in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1983 and acquired by Intel in 2015 before becoming independent once again in 2025 as a company focused on development of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology and system on a chip FPGAs.
Early history
The company was founded in 1983 by semiconductor veterans Robert Hartmann, Paul Newhagen, James Sansbury, and Michael Magranet with $1,300,000 in seed money. The name of the company was a play on "alterable", the type of chips the company created. The founders selected Rodney Smith to be the company's first CEO.[3] In 1988, Altera became a public company via an initial public offering (IPO).[4]