30 minutes with Altera CEO Sandra Rivera discussing the Past, Present, and Future of a major FPGA vendor

By Steven Leibson, EE Journal (March 3, 2025)

FPGA maker Altera declared independence from Intel on February 29, 2024 – Leap Day – and reclaimed its original, storied name in the process. The intended and explicit symbolism was that Altera was making a great leap forward by becoming independent. Intel purchased Altera at the end of 2015 for $16.7 billion and renamed the organization. It became the Intel Programmable Solutions Group (PSG). The acquisition did not turn out to be a marriage made in heaven due to the mismatch between Intel’s top priority, introducing and shipping CPUs, and Intel PSG’s mission: introducing and shipping FPGAs. I worked for Intel PSG’s marketing group during the last few years of PSG’s existence and can attest to this priority mismatch.

The person overseeing Altera’s re-emergence as an independent FPGA vendor is CEO Sandra Rivera. According to her official Intel biography, Rivera previously “led Intel’s Data Center and AI Group, where she guided development of data center products, including Intel Xeon processors, Intel Max and Flex series graphic processors, Intel Gaudi AI accelerators and FPGA products.” Notice how the FPGAs were tacked onto the tail end of Rivera’s bio. I don’t think that’s by accident.

Rivera shouldered a major turnaround when she became Altera’s CEO, and because of the efforts she’s made in the past year, I named her “FPGA Person of the Year” in my January FPGA Awards article. Not long after that article appeared, I received an email telling me that Rivera would like to speak with me via teleconference. We spoke for 30 minutes on February 6, and the relevant parts of that conversation appear below.

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