Industry Expert Blogs

Altera Corp.'s second major acquisition in a month would appear to be a coup in bringing sophisticated power management to FPGAs.  But the Enpirion Power SoC products will be seen as a discrete product line for the foreseeable future, due to differences in transistor structure and feature sizes for the two products.

Altera announced on May 14 its intention to acquire Enpirion, immediately sparking pontification from market analysts that the company would move rapidly to turn standalone products from Enpirion into hard-IP cores for Stratix, Cyclone, and Arria FPGAs.  Jeff Waters, senior vice president of military, industrial, and communication products at Altera, said that some level of power control within programmable logic can be anticipated as a result of the acquisition, but Enpirion's standalone SoC product line represents a significant opportunity in its own right.