Intel is in talks to buy Altera, according to the Wall Street Journal. Altera’s market capitalization grew from $10.4 billion to $13.4 billion after the Journal reported the news on Friday. The acquisition would be the biggest ever by Intel, whose market value is $151.6 billion.
The Journal notes that Intel has worked with Altera before, citing a 2013 agreement to offer the fabless company access to Intel’s most advanced process. However, the Journal suggests Altera would continue to use TSMC to make most of its FPGAs because of the difficulty of moving production.
The acquisition would continue a trend in the industry; NXP and Freescale announced a merger earlier this month that would make the combined chip company the top chip supplier to the automotive industry.
The Journal presents an interesting graphic presenting market capitalization and year-on-year change rates in revenue and share price for semiconductor companies including AMD, ARM Holdings, Broadcom, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments as well as Altera and FPGA rival Xilinx. You can read the complete article here (subscription required).
The acquisition could give Intel a boost in the embedded space. The recent article “When Your Embedded Processor Runs Out of Steam, Try Parallelism” by Ron Wilson at Altera hints at the possibilities.
