Altera introduces the Altera® QuartusIQ AI Powered Expert Companion integrated into their Quartus Prime Pro software. This new technology delivers an AI co-pilot companion to help complete the full FPGA design lifecycle from initial design intent through to sign-off of the target hardware. Built upon open-standard Model Context Protocol (MCP) interfaces, QuartusIQ delivers project-aware expert decision support with natural-language interaction and automates the full target hardware validation, design implementation, and verification flow, and fully controlling the process back to system engineers. QuartusIQ orchestrates closed-loop designs flows on a native run-time harness to reduce overall design cycles by up to 1.5 times-potentially saving months in multi-year hardware programs while maintaining enterprise level data privacy, the solution has on-premises local deployment optimized on NVIDIA® DGX™ Station for Windows using Nemotron open-weight models.
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Highlighting the strategic impact of agentic workflows in hardware design, Farhad Shafai, head of Business Solutions and Marketing at Altera, noted, “FPGA developers are under increasing pressure to deliver more capable designs while managing growing device, IP, timing and verification complexity. Agentic AI brings expert guidance and workflow automation into the development environment, helping engineers spend less time searching for information and coordinating routine tasks, and more time making the design decisions that move products toward production. With QuartusIQ, customers can apply project-aware FPGA expertise across the design flow while keeping engineers in control.” Reinforcing this collaborative security approach, Chris Marriott, vice president, Enterprise Platforms at NVIDIA, stated, “Agentic AI will help engineers tackle increasingly complex FPGA software workflows and move from design intent to validated implementations faster. Together with Altera, we’re optimizing our Nemotron models for QuartusIQ’s specialized capabilities. Running this agentic AI locally on the DGX Station gives engineers the ultimate deskside supercomputer to accelerate development without ever having to compromise the security of their sensitive IP.” QuartusIQ will officially roll out within Quartus Prime Pro software v26.3 during Altera Innovators Day.
