(PRNewswire) — Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced first quarter sales of $435.5 million, down 9 percent from the fourth quarter of 2014 and down 6 percent from the first quarter of 2014. First quarter net income was $94.9 million, $0.31 per diluted share, compared with net income of $111.1 million, $0.36 per diluted share, in the fourth quarter of 2014 and $116.5 million, $0.37 per diluted share, in the first quarter of 2014.

Cash flow from operating activities was $136.6 million. Altera repurchased approximately 1.6 million shares during the quarter at a cost of approximately $57.5 million.

Altera's board of directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.18 per share, to be paid on June 1, 2015 to shareholders of record on May 11, 2015.

"While we had anticipated a weak start to the year, the first quarter was more challenging than expected," said John Daane, president, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board. "There continues to be solid market acceptance of our Generation 10 devices, with record opportunities for our high-end 14 nm FinFET Stratix 10 FPGAs. The combination of our HyperFlex architecture and the FinFET manufacturing process delivers substantial competitive advantages and market expansion potential."

Recent accomplishments mark Altera's continuing progress:

• At this year's Mobile World Congress, Altera and China Mobile demonstrated jointly a Centralized/Coordinated/Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) platform targeting the next generation of virtualized 5G wireless networks. This approach will dramatically improve the user experience, achieving much higher channel capacity and spectrum efficiency, reducing network power consumption, while supporting flexible and agile network deployments. C-RAN offers the potential for new network operator business models and support for numerous new end user 5G wireless network applications. This strategic collaboration, formally established between Altera and China Mobile Research Institute (CMRI) in 2014, has achieved a significant milestone with this innovative wireless network solution. To accelerate the development and deployment of such next-generation wireless networks, FPGA technologies play a key role in data processing acceleration, component connectivity, and front-haul data transportation in the C-RAN system.
• Altera has strengthened its leadership position in SoC FPGA products by shipping initial devices of its second-generation SoC family. These Arria^® 10 SoC devices are the industry's only programmable devices that combine ARM^® processors with a 20 nm FPGA fabric. Arria 10 SoCs bring across-the-board improvements to enable higher performing, lower power, and more feature rich embedded systems compared to previous generation SoC FPGAs. Arria 10 SoCs provide up to 50 percent higher performance and up to 40 percent lower power than the previous generation. Arria 10 SoCs are optimized to deliver the performance, power, security and cost requirements for next-generation embedded applications within wireless infrastructure, wireline communications, computer and storage, and broadcast equipment. Altera's SoC portfolio will also include a 3rd-generation 14 nm Stratix^® 10 SoC with a 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex^TM-A53 processor for embedded developers that demand the highest performance and power efficiency.

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