Wow – Forbes says Altera is among world's 100 most innovative companies!

The folks at Altera are all jolly happy with themselves, because they just announced that they've been selected as one of the 100 most innovative companies in the world, according to a study recently published by Forbes. In fact, this is the second consecutive year Altera was recognized by Forbes with this distinction.

"As a company that champions innovation, we deeply appreciate this global recognition of our foremost core value," said John Daane, president, CEO and chairman of Altera. "Altera nurtures innovation among our employees. But equally important, Altera's business model is to unleash innovation within our customers' engineering teams and boost the success of their products. Altera's culture of innovation gives our customers a measurable advantage in their system development efforts."

Altera's innovations cover the spectrum of semiconductor and systems technologies. The company's pioneering work in process adaptation, circuit design, and SoC architecture underlie recent announcements on 20 nm technology, deployment of the world's fastest backplane transceivers, and on being the first to roll out all 28 nm FPGA product families in production.

Altera's innovation in system design methodology has led to the company's OpenCL effort for deploying FPGAs as accelerators in high-performance systems. Recent innovations in application technology include a development kit enabling beyond-high-definition (HD) video processing, and a digitally-enhanced RF development kit jointly developed with Texas Instruments.

The citation joins a list of honors recognizing Altera for its innovations, including the 2012 Information Week 500, an annual listing of the nation's most innovative users of business technology. In addition, Altera was featured on the 2011 Forbes World's Most Innovative Companies list, the Global Semiconductor Alliance's 2010 Best Financially Managed Semiconductor Company award, the EE Times ACE Award for Company of the Year in 2010, and numerous EDN Innovation Awards and EE Times ACE Awards on individual products. These recognitions underline innovation as a key component of Altera's culture and its business strategy.

The Forbes ranking is based on "Innovation Premium," an indication of the premium the stock market gives a company because investors expect it to launch new offerings and enter new markets. The algorithm was developed by Hal Gregersen, Jeff Dyer, and Clayton Christensen, and described in their book The Innovator's DNA (Harvard Business Press, 2011).

---

If you found this article to be of interest, visit Programmable Logic Designline where – in addition to my Max's Cool Beans blogs – you will find the latest and greatest design, technology, product, and news articles with regard to programmable logic devices of every flavor and size (FPGAs, CPLDs, CSSPs, PSoCs...).

Also, you can obtain a highlights update delivered directly to your inbox by signing up for my weekly newsletter – just Click Here to request this newsletter using the Manage Newsletters tab (if you aren't already a member you'll be asked to register, but it's free and painless so don't let that stop you [grin]).