Intel has been in the news for many reasons in recent weeks, from rumors of talks with Qualcomm to cuts in jobs and capital expenditure. On a more positive note, however, the company’s rebranded Altera business—which was launched earlier this year—held its first Altera Innovator’s Day yesterday under the new brand. During the event, Altera announced details of its Agilex 3 FPGAs, new features in its Quartus Prime Pro developer software, and 11 new Agilex 5 FPGA-based development kits from its ecosystem.
These developments were announced to coincide with the event at the company’s headquarters in San Jose, Calif., to showcase its FPGA technology and solutions to its customers and partners.
In a press briefing prior to the event, Altera CEO Sandra Rivera was upbeat about progress with the business as it continues its path to independence and eventually going public in 2026. Through the briefing, Rivera emphasized Altera’s full-stack solution from edge-to-cloud, addressing data center, aerospace and defense sectors, communications infrastructure, automotive, industrial, test, medical, and embedded markets.
During an interview with EE Times at embedded world earlier this year, she reiterated the role of FPGAs for intelligent computing at the edge—especially for AI inference workloads. In the accompanying press note, Altera said these are addressed using Agilex FPGAs infused with AI Tensor blocks and the Altera FPGA AI Suite, which helps FPGA development for AI inference using popular frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch and OpenVINO toolkit and proven FPGA development flows.
As noted earlier, there were three key updates in this week’s announcement from Altera: details of the Agilex 3 FPGAs, which were part of the roadmap outlined back in February of this year; new features for its software development platform; and new development kits from the ecosystem.
Agilex 3: Targeting intelligent edge with logic elements
The first of Altera’s announcements was the details of the Agilex 3 FPGAs, which Rivera said are on schedule for production in mid-2025. She noted that these FGPAs feature higher levels of integration than previous generations, and are designed to meet power, performance and size requirements for intelligent edge applications with densities ranging from 25,000-135,000 logic elements.
The company’s FPGAs incorporate an on-chip dual Cortex A55 Arm hard processor subsystem with a programmable fabric infused with AI capabilities, which enables real-time compute for time-sensitive applications like autonomous vehicles and industrial IoT. Altera said that for smart factory automation technologies like machine vision and robotics, the Agilex 3 FPGAs allow for seamless integration of sensors, drivers, actuators and machine learning algorithms.
New security enhancements in Agilex 3, such as bitstream encryption, authentication and physical anti-tamper detection, help meet the needs of both defense and commercial projects, as well as help with reliable and secure performance in critical industrial automation applications. Altera said its HyperFlex architecture gives the Agilex 3 FPGAs a 1.9× performance improvement over the previous generation, and enables high clock frequencies in a power- and cost-optimized FPGA. Integrated high-speed transceivers operating up to 12.5 Gbps and added support for LPDDR4 memory provide the potential for additional system performance.
Software support for Agilex 3 FPGAs will start in Q1 2025, with development kits and production shipments expected to start in mid-2025.
Faster compile times with new software version
The second part of Altera’s announcement was the addition of new features in its Quartus Prime Pro software. The company said its upcoming Quartus Prime Pro 24.3 release unlocks more devices within the Agilex portfolio and enables improved support for embedded applications. A key part of this was the 29% faster compile times compared to Quartus 19.1, according to Altera.
In particular, the company said customers can use this release to start designing Agilex 5 FPGA D-series, which targets a broader range of use cases compared to Agilex 5 FPGA E-series. Altera offers software support for its Agilex 5 FPGA E-series through a no-cost license in the Quartus Prime software, lowering the barrier to entry for its mid-range FPGA family.
The new software release also 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. This enables access to Agilex 5 FPGA design examples that showcase Nios V capabilities, such as lockstep, full ECC and branch prediction. Altera added that new OS and RTOS support for the Agilex 5 SoC FPGA-based hard processor subsystem is included in the latest releases of Linux, VxWorks and Zephyr.
New Agilex 5-based dev kits
The last part of the announcement was the availability of 11 new Agilex 5 FPGA-based development kits and system-on-modules. “We have tripled the ecosystem members since launch at the beginning of this year,” Rivera said in the press briefing.
