Altera CEO Raghib Hussain has delivered six chip tape-outs in nine months since the company split from Intel, with three of those designs arriving ahead of schedule, he told EE Times on July 22. The programmable logic company is also growing revenue “in the 20% range” and has cut product returns by 60%.
Hussain took the helm just over a year ago, inheriting a business that had lived inside Intel for nearly a decade. Nine months after closing the separation with backing from Silverlake, the CEO said full independence was necessary to install a new culture and operating rhythm.
“I am super-pleased with our progress on execution,” Hussain said. “Full independence was needed to implement our culture, our style, without anyone telling us what to do.”
Altera is filling gaps in its product roadmap and defining its next-generation architecture. The company taped out six chips last year, which Hussain called an unusually high pace for Altera’s historical cadence. The team is working to maintain that momentum while ensuring the next product cycle is properly defined from the start.
The results mark a sharp turnaround from the stagnation that plagued Altera during its years under Intel management. The company’s FPGA products compete with AMD’s Xilinx division in a programmable-logic market that is expanding as AI inference and edge computing drive demand for reconfigurable accelerators. Altera’s post-independence strategy centers on execution speed, customer responsiveness, and product roadmap clarity — areas where Hussain says the company had fallen behind.
