Altera announces record Q3 results

SAN JOSE, USA: Altera Corp. announced third quarter sales of $527.5 million, up 12 percent from the second quarter of 2010 and up 84 percent from the third quarter of 2009.

New product sales increased 24 percent sequentially. Third quarter net income was $217.5 million, $0.69 per diluted share, compared with net income of $180.6 million, $0.58 per diluted share, in the second quarter of 2010 and $56.7 million, $0.19 per diluted share, in the third quarter of 2009.

Year-to-date cash flow from operating activities was $646.5 million. Altera ended the quarter with $2.4 billion in cash and short-term investments.

Altera's board of directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.06 per share payable on December 1, 2010 to stockholders of record on November 10, 2010.

"The combination of a step up in telecom and wireless demand and stellar new product growth created another quarter of double-digit sales gains for Altera. The 53 percent sequential growth we saw in our 40-nm FPGAs demonstrates the attractiveness of Altera's FPGAs in today's marketplace," said John Daane, president, CEO, and chairman of the board.

"We are in the final stages of development for our initial 28-nm FPGAs and believe that the unique architectural features and performance we offer will extend our current 40-nm technology leadership to this next process node."

Several recent accomplishments mark the company's continuing progress:

* Altera has reached a significant milestone in the development of its next-generation 28-nm FPGA by becoming the first company to successfully demonstrate 25-Gbps transceiver performance in programmable logic.

Altera achieved this milestone in its 28-nm Stratix V transceiver test chip, a prototyping platform that Altera developed, leveraging its close relationship with foundry partner TSMC. Reaching the 25-Gbps milestone more than doubles the transceiver performance in currently available FPGA solutions, and rivals or exceeds the abilities of competing ASSP offerings.

Today, Altera is the only company shipping production FPGAs with transceivers operating at 11.3 Gbps. Being the first vendor to reach the 25-Gbps milestone further extends Altera's leadership in transceiver technology.

* Altera has launched its Embedded Initiative which offers a new system-level integration tool that provides a single FPGA design flow supporting a range of embedded processor offerings based on ARM, Intel and MIPS architectures, as well as Altera's Nios II processor. This initiative will expand Altera's current embedded partner programs by embracing the broad ecosystems from ARM, Intel, and MIPS, as well as the FPGA world.

Intel previously announced a new configurable Atom-based processor that pairs an Altera FPGA with an Intel E600 series Atom processor in a multi-chip single package solution. In addition, Altera has unveiled an agreement with ARM to license a range of technologies, including the Cortex-A9 microprocessor.

In early 2011, Altera will broaden its soft-processor cores to include the MIPS Technologies MIPS32 processor which will complement Altera's current Nios II soft-core processor. The combination of FPGAs and processors has the potential to create new levels of customization in embedded system design, and Altera's single design flow reduces overall system design cost, achieves fast time to market, and increases design flexibility.