Altera pitches four FPGA families as sensor hubs for NVIDIA-powered humanoids

Altera is selling its programmable chips as the sensor front end of NVIDIA's Holoscan Sensor Bridge for robots and humanoids, according to a report by Korean trade outlet The Elec (디일렉) of a talk by Altera director Lee Nam-hoon at a SEDEX 2026 side conference in Seoul on Oct 16; Altera has not issued a release on the talk.

In the design he described, an Altera FPGA gathers camera, lidar, radar and ultrasonic data arriving in different interface standards, handles latency-critical jobs such as localisation, motor control and image pre-processing, and sends the data as Ethernet packets straight into NVIDIA GPU memory without passing through a CPU, which the company said cuts latency and replaces per-sensor cabling with a single high-speed Ethernet link.

Altera offers four FPGA lines for the bridge, from the entry-level Cyclone and the Agilex 3 for small robots to the Agilex 5 aimed at humanoids and the top-end Agilex 7, and ships two modular development kits for an Agilex 5 reference design while partners including Terasic and Critical Link build system-on-modules.

The talk was part of the same Oct 16 conference on chips for humanoids at which, as MEKAWIRE reported on Oct 19, Infineon showed a GaN joint-drive board and TDK InvenSense pitched magnetic sensors for robot finger joints.