Intel Corp. may look to acquire an FPGA supplier such as Xilinx Inc. or Altera Corp. in 2010 in an effort to expand its presence in the embedded market as well as SoCs, according to a Wall Street analyst.
Christopher Danely, an analyst with JP Morgan Securities Inc., said in a report titled “Top 10 Semiconductor Predictions for 2010″ that the year could bring a big strategic acquisition to the semiconductor space. In addition to Intel acquiring an FPGA vendor, Danely speculated that other large acquisitions could be possible, including Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) buying a power management IC company and Microchip Technology Inc. buying a company to expand its presence in the microcontroller market.
Intel has been gearing up to expand its presence in the embedded space, last year acquiring embedded software specialist Wind River Systems Inc. and porting unspecified Atom processor cores to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC)’s technology platform. Danely speculates that an acquisition of Xilinx or Altera would jump start these efforts, but it is unclear how the FPGA technologies would mesh with Intel’s. Like many companies, Intel previously played in the programmable logic space but abandoned those efforts years ago.
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1 Landscape of Programmable Logic | Formidable Engineering Consultants // Mar 25, 2011 at 7:04 pm
[...] that Achronix is using Intel as their foundry. This might finally put an end to those persistent rumors that Intel is poised to purchase Altera or Xilinx (is it the same analyst every time who leaks [...]