Altera is launching its latest family of Agilex FPGA 3 chips to help developers expand the boundaries of the intelligent edge.
The Agilex 3 FPGA chips are now in production, said Sandra Rivera, CEO of Altera, in a press briefing. These devices are important for increasing intelligence at the edge and enabling AI proliferation.
Altera’s field programmable gate array (FPGA) chips are programmable chips that have found a home in a wide variety of edge applications, including robotics, factory automation systems and medical equipment. Altera is targeting its latest Agilex FPGAs as well as its Quartus Prime Pro software, and FPGA AI Suite at the intelligent edge market.
It’s a big launch for Altera as it’s the first as a newly independent company. Altera was originally a chip manufacturing company that was acquired by Intel in 2015 for $16.7 billion and merged into the company’s data center unit under the Programmable Solutions Group (PSG) brand. But Intel ran into a number of manufacturing challenges and leadership changes.
After nearly a year of preparation, Altera spun out of Intel formally on January 10, with longtime Intel executive Rivera as CEO.
The Agilex 3 FPGAs can deliver 1.9 times higher fabric performance compared to the previous generation with 38% lower power, said Rivera, in a press briefing.
“Since last year, we have really been focused on our leadership roadmap and execution excellence and really driving a full-stack portfolio for all of the segments and customers that we support and that we service,” Rivera said. “And that really starts with this waterfall strategy that we have for the entire Agilex roadmap that we have introduced into the market. Now we’re introducing the last component of that in terms of the Agilex roadmap. It is the more cost-constrained, power-constrained part of the roadmap.”
One big family
At the high end, Altera offers its Agilex 7 and Agilex 9 cihps for high compute density. It has Agilex 5 in the midrange and now Agilex 3 completes the product line.
The recent introductions of Agilex 5 and Agilex 3 lower barriers to entry, increase the market participation, and just accelerate the rate of innovation overall in the programmable logic industry, Rivera said. At the high end, Agilex 7 and Agilex 9 are suited for data center infrastructure, networking and communications applications, as well as the aerospace sectors with the built-in RF and multi chip packaging capability.
“In the mid-range of the applications, we have power and performance optimized capabilities, and we are delivering two times better performance per watt versus the competition in that very meaty, large mid-range of applications and customers and segments,” Rivera said.
She said that Altera’s programmable solutions meet the stringent power, performance and size requirements of embedded and intelligent edge applications. These hardware solutions, along with Altera’s FPGA AI Suite, enable machine learning engineers, software developers, and FPGA designers to create custom FPGA AI platforms using industry-standard frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch,
and development tools such as OpenVINO and Quartus Prime software.
Rivera said Altera’s low-power, cost-optimized Agilex 3 FPGAs are available for ordering. The FPGA’s high-performance programmable architecture, along with built-in AI Tensor blocks and embedded processors, enables businesses to rapidly modernize their edge and embedded infrastructure by deploying customized AI solutions that deliver the low latency, energy efficiency and agility needed for system longevity.
In robot control systems, Agilex 3 FPGAs bring real-time control to multi-axis robot arms by fusing machine learning capabilities into multi-sensor pipelines. And in smart factory cameras, Agilex 3 FPGAs improve defect detection by using fine-grained parallel processing and CNNs trained for object recognition to analyze vast amounts of data.
I asked Rivera whether she was concerned about TSMC being affected in the possible tariff wars if the trade war spills over to Taiwan, as Donald Trump has said before. She noted that since Altera uses both TSMC and Intel Foundry (the contract manufacturing arm of Intel), it is shielded from such concerns. Intel has numerous chip factories in the U.S., and TSMC is also making chips in the U.S. now. And Altera’s defense-related projects in particular also require domestic production and that will be unaffected.
How FPGAs are used in the field
For developers and customers, this means that Altera is bringing more intelligent compute to industrial and embedded markets. That means AI’s intelligence can spread far into everyday edge devices, where more computing can be done in a cost-efficient and network-efficient way.
The devices can boost applications including industrial, automotive and defense users. It can help drones be deployed with more built-in intelligence, as an example. It also enables seamless integration of sensors and actuators in robotics in smart factories. Those robots require precise motor control algorithms to function efficiently on factory floors.
“An FPGA will be used extensively in those environments because they can accommodate multiple operations in parallel and efficiently handle that continuous flow of data streams,” Rivera said. “So by leveraging an FPGA that in many cases is already there and designed into the system, we see our embedded developers fusing machine learning capabilities into their support pipeline or their sensor pipeline to incorporate AI algorithms in robotics at the edge.”
FPGAs are also used in endoscopy and MRI machines in medical fields. And they can bring greater computing power and efficiency to processing of LIDAR sensor data in self-driving cars. And since the chips are reprogrammable in the field, they can be updated over the air to adjust for the evolution of standards, algorithms or capabilities. That makes the designs future proof, Rivera said.
Production ready
Customers can place orders now for production-quality Agilex 3 devices, development kits, selected partner boards and system-on-modules.
The first wave of Agilex 5 FPGAs E-Series devices are now fully qualified and released for high-volume production. Compared to the Agilex 5 D-Series FPGAs, the Agilex 5 E-Series FPGAs are optimized for more power-sensitive applications that require high-performance with smaller form factors and logic densities. Agilex 5 E-Series FPGAs, with AI-infused fabric, bring high levels of integration and improved computing capabilities for intelligent edge applications, including video, industrial, robotics, and medical
systems.
In a continued effort to enhance its cost-optimized product portfolio, Altera is expanding the MAX 10 FPGA family with new package options. The MAX 10 10M40 and 10M50 product lines are now offered in variable pitch BGA packages. This new package option significantly increases the value of these highly integrated devices by reducing form factor while maintaining a high IO count, resulting in a lower total cost of ownership for users. Customers can place orders now for engineering samples of MAX 10 FPGAs in the VPBGA-610 package, with production silicon available in Q3 2025.
“With today’s announcements, we continue to expand our leadership programmable portfolio by offering an even broader range of end-to-end solutions built on decades of expertise and a strong ecosystem of partners,” said Rivera. “With our latest FPGA products and development tools, we provide embedded developers a seamless approach to deliver highperforming and high-quality intelligent edge solutions for the era of AI.”
Altera is showcasing its latest FPGA innovations and development tools at Embedded World 2025 in Nuremburg, Germany.
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