Intel acquires another FPGA supplier

Source: Semiconductor Industry Observation translated from techcrunch

According to foreign media techcrunch, Intel announced today that it will acquire Omnitek , an England-based company that has developed FPGA solutions specifically for video and AI applications.

The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but from what I can tell, the price is not important to Intel, as Omnitek has raised virtually no capital since 1998. In this acquisition, Intel will acquire all 40 employees of Omnitek in Basingstoke, UK, as well as the rest of Omnitek’s business, which includes more than 220 FPGA IP cores and accompanying software.

After the acquisition, employees and other members of the Omnitek business will become part of Intel's FPGA business, which is located within its Programmable Solutions Group, which was formed in large part through Intel's $16.7 billion acquisition of Altera in 2015. The integration of the two parties will also be relatively simple because Omnitek has worked closely with Altera over the past years, Intel Vice President David Moore said in an interview.

As computing complexity and performance demands increase, Intel has delved deeper into the design and production of FPGA chips, and Omnitek is a logical addition in this regard as they have expanded the application range of their video and computer vision solutions to medical devices, defense applications, security, AR and VR, broadcasting, professional video conferencing, and more, and the list continues to grow.

“Omnitek’s technology is a great complement to our FPGA business,” said Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group, in a statement. “Their deep system-level FPGA expertise and high-performance video and vision-related technologies make them a trusted partner for many of our most important customers. Together, we will deliver leading FPGA solutions for video, vision and AI inference applications on Intel FPGAs, accelerating time to market for existing customers while winning new ones. ”

While Omnitek’s history and work has primarily been in video (and previously broadcast), they have since expanded into AI reasoning as well.

"From the data center to devices, compute-intensive applications such as 8K video and artificial intelligence require a host of innovative compute engines," said Roger Fawcett, CEO and founder of Omnitek. "FPGAs are playing an increasingly important role as a complement to other processing architectures, and Intel is at the heart of this revolution. Omnitek is proud to have our IP and engineers join the talented team at Intel's Programmable Solutions Group."

Intel said the silicon market is currently worth $300 billion per year, of which programmable solutions currently account for $8 billion but are expected to grow, “Any cloud service provider, enterprise and embedded customer of Intel is using FPGAs in video and vision related applications. This deal brings more of that business directly to Intel for more growth.”