Altera to open chip design center in Austin, creating several hundred jobs

By Kirk Ladendorf

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Altera Corp. said Thursday that it is setting up a semiconductor design center in Austin that it expects will employ "several hundred engineers" within the next few years.

The well-established Silicon Valley company makes customizable chips called programmable logic devices, which are used in communications equipment, industrial equipment, computer and storage equipment, broadcast equipment, medical equipment and other markets.

The expansion into Austin follows the company's decision to create a new family of customizable system chips that couple Altera's programmable logic technology with processing cores derived from basic low-power designs created by ARM Ltd.

"Austin is one of the centers of know-how in embedded processing," said Misha Burich, senior vice president for research and development. "We decided to come to the place where there is a lot of talent and know-how to tap into and to grow in.

"We didn't pick Austin lightly," he said. "We did a worldwide study, and Austin was ranked No. 1."

Altera expects to sign a lease soon on a space in Southwest Austin and begin recruiting senior management and building a design team.

Austin will be the company's first U.S. design center outside of Silicon Valley. It has others in Canada, the United Kingdom, China and Malaysia.

The company will join a growing group of firms in Austin that work with ARM, which also has a major design center here. Local companies in the ARM camp include Texas Instruments, Freescale Semiconductor and Samsung Electronics Co.

Altera, founded in 1983, is based in San Jose, Calif., and has a worldwide design team of more than 1,000 engineers.

It has more than 13,000 customers worldwide and had nearly $2 billion in revenue last year.

"This is a great project," said Dave Porter, senior vice president for economic development at the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce.

"It's a terrific win for us. It is another testament to our strength in semiconductor design," he said.

The company explored the possibility of applying for City of Austin incentives for the project, Porter said, but it decided that it wanted to set up in an area that was outside the city's desired development zone, roughly the area east of MoPac Boulevard (Loop 1). Locating in the zone is a condition for receiving city incentives.