Cash flow from operating activities in 2012 was $587.2 million. Altera repurchased 1.6 million shares of its common stock during the quarter at a cost of $50.0 million. Altera ended the quarter with $3.7 billion in cash and investments.
Altera's board of directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.10 per share payable on March 1, 2013 to stockholders of record on February 11, 2013.
"While our new products had a double-digit sequential growth quarter, sales of our older products were soft—the result of a sluggish global economy," said John Daane, president, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board. "Sales of 40 nm devices, our largest selling process node, and where we are the market leader, are likely to strengthen further as we progress through 2013. At the most advanced process node, 28 nm, Altera remains the design-win value leader, giving us a substantial growth opportunity as these customer designs transition into production."
Several recent accomplishments mark the company's continuing progress:
- Huawei Technologies, a leading global information and communications technology solutions provider, has presented Altera with its 2012 Excellent Core Partner Award. In making this award, Huawei specifically recognized Altera for its excellence in terms of quality, delivery of leading-edge technologies and services. The Excellent Core Partner Award is the highest recognition Huawei gives to its suppliers. Altera is among an elite set of suppliers to earn this award for outstanding contribution toward Huawei's business success throughout 2012. In 2012, Huawei realized the performance advantage offered by Altera's 28 nm Stratix® V FPGAs and selected the high-end product family for use in the company's 400G high-capacity OTN system. By using the industry's first high-end 28 nm production FPGAs, Huawei enabled the evolution of communications infrastructure such as 400G systems and other high-performance systems in a variety of markets throughout the world.
- Altera also received the 2012 Global Excellent Partnership Award from ZTE Corporation, a leading provider of telecommunications equipment and network solutions. The award recognizes Altera for overall performance in delivering best-in-class products and services to ZTE during the past year. According to ZTE, innovative programmable solutions and technical support from Altera played a critical role in supporting product development for the company's existing and next-generation communication products. ZTE presents its Global Excellent Partnership Award each year to suppliers meeting rigorous performance criteria. Winners are chosen based on partner satisfaction surveys among company staff, including development and material engineers and purchasing employees. Suppliers are evaluated on cost efficiencies, on-time delivery, quality standards and service records. Altera scored the highest marks in all categories.
- Altera is now shipping the first of its 28 nm SoC devices, which combine a dual-core ARM® Cortex™-A9 processor system with FPGA logic on a single device. The initial devices to ship are the low-power, low-cost Cyclone® V SoCs. Altera SoCs include several distinctive features that enable developers in the wireless communications, industrial, video surveillance, automotive and medical equipment markets to create custom SoC variants optimized for system power, board space, performance and cost requirements. In addition, Altera is the only FPGA vendor today shipping SoCs that offer 32-bit error correction code (ECC) support which helps ensure data integrity throughout the embedded system. ECC support is a requirement for customers who must have high-performance and reliable systems. With silicon now available, customers who used Altera's SoC Virtual Target to develop their application software can now quickly port their application software into the SoC, saving months of development time. Further strengthening the SoC device tools ecosystem support, Altera and ARM have jointly developed the ARM Development Studio 5™ Altera Edition (DS-5™) toolkit with FPGA-adaptive debugging, which exclusively supports Altera SoC devices. The DS-5 toolkit is designed to remove the debugging barrier between the integrated dual-core CPU subsystem and the FPGA fabric in Altera SoC devices, providing embedded software developers an unprecedented level of full-chip visibility and control.
- Altera has developed the FPGA industry's first Software Development Kit (SDK) for OpenCL™ (Open Computing Language) which combines the massively parallel architecture of an FPGA with the OpenCL parallel programming model. OpenCL is an open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of hardware accelerators, including CPUs, GPGPUs and FPGAs. The semiconductor industry's approach for boosting system performance has evolved from increasing frequency in single-core CPUs, to using multi-core CPUs, to using parallel processor arrays. Today, system designers are turning to FPGAs, which are fine-grained, massively parallel digital logic arrays architected to execute computations in parallel to create higher performance levels at a fraction of the power compared to other hardware alternatives. By allowing system developers and programmers familiar with C to quickly and easily develop high-performance, power-efficient FPGA-based applications in a high-level language, Altera's SDK for OpenCL enables customers to easily adopt FPGAs and leverage the performance and power benefits the devices provide. This unified, high-level design flow for hardware and software development automates the time-consuming tasks required in typical hardware-design language flows, and the resulting FPGA-based solution can deliver more than 5X performance/watt compared to alternative hardware implementations.
SELECTED FOURTH QUARTER REVENUE AND RELATED RESULTS
|
Key New Product Devices |
|
Sequential Comparisons | |
|
Stratix V |
|
(9)% | |
|
Arria V |
|
152% | |
|
Stratix IV |
|
19% | |
|
Arria II |
|
(6)% | |
|
Cyclone IV |
|
21% | |
|
HardCopy IV |
|
(15)% | |
