After a month of negotiations, Intel agreed to purchase Altera company for the sum of 16.7 billion US dollars. Altera is the world's second largest manufacturer of programmable logic arrays (FPGA) or other programmable logic devices (PLD).
Intel makes many and various processors in FPGA but the field is now making its first steps. Purchase of Altera will greatly expand the variety of products on Intel.
Intel and Altera several years working together. In 2013 Intel started manufacturing chips on behalf of other companies and Altera was one of them.
2014 were presented Xeon processors with embedded FPGA dies, probably produced by Altera. From a financial perspective, the shareholders of Altera will receive from Intel in about $ 54 each. The share price has risen by 11% after completion of the exchange transactions on Friday night and is 56% higher than the price of March 26, when rumors about a possible merger of the two companies. At the end of 2014 financial income of Altera reached $ 1.9 billion, and Intel - $ 55,9 billions. In Altera employs about 3000 people and in Intel - 106 000.
The deal should be closed in about 6-9 months.
