Semiconductor History | 101 Innovation Drive, 28 December 2015 — Intel Buys a Chip That Can Change After It Ships
· 2015-12
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Semiconductor History | 101 Innovation Drive, 28 December 2015 — Intel Buys a Chip That Can Change After It Ships
kevin
At the center of this compact development board is an Altera Cyclone V, a field-programmable gate array whose internal logic can be configured after the chip has been manufactured.
Intel completed its acquisition of Altera on 28 December 2015 in a transaction valued at approximately $16.7 billion. Altera became Intel's Programmable Solutions Group, bringing programmable silicon, design tools, and customer relationships into a company built around general-purpose processors.
An FPGA solves a different problem from a conventional CPU.
Instead of executing every task through a fixed processor architecture, it lets engineers arrange logic blocks for a particular workload and revise that arrangement later. The flexibility is useful in communications equipment, industrial systems, data centers, and early versions of specialized accelerators.
Intel expected the combination to matter especially in servers and connected devices.
A Xeon processor could handle broad software while programmable logic accelerated selected data paths or adapted to a changing standard. Intel could also bring Altera designs into its advanced factories, joining product strategy to a manufacturing system that was still presented as an advantage.
The purchase also exposed the cost of buying growth at its peak.
FPGAs remained important, but the combined business did not become the simple transformation implied by the price. Intel later restored the Altera name and, in September 2025, completed the sale of a 51 percent stake to Silver Lake while retaining 49 percent.
Those headline valuations should not be compared as if Intel bought and resold the same asset outright.
The later transaction left Intel with a large minority interest and reflected a changed company, market, and capital structure. It still made the strategic arc visible: acquire a specialized chip business, integrate it, then give it greater independence when Intel needed tighter investment focus.
The board in the photograph places that arc in a working object rather than a merger announcement. Memory packages, connectors, and power components surround the Cyclone V because a programmable chip only becomes useful inside a system that supplies data, tools, and a specific job.
The pin marks Altera's building at 101 Innovation Drive in San Jose, the headquarters address in its 2015 filings and still the address given in current company terms. It is an active corporate site, so the appropriate view is from the public street and sidewalk.
Photo: Antti Lukats, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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