Intel Acquires Omnitek To Improve FPGA Vision Offerings

Intel Corporation has announced to acquire Omnitek, a provider of optimized video and vision FPGA IP solutions. Omnitek’s technology enables customized high-performance vision and artificial intelligence (AI) inferencing capabilities on FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array) for customers across a range of end markets. Omnitek’s IP addresses demanding application requirements in areas such as video conferencing, projection and display, medical vision systems, and more.

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

What Is Omnitek: Based in Basingstoke, England, Omnitek was founded in 1998 and has developed over 220 FPGA IP cores and accompanying software including performance-leading solutions for WARP, ISP processing and video connectivity that significantly improve time-to-market for customers. It has also enabled new customers without FPGA expertise to realize customized, integrated and highly efficient solutions on FPGAs. In addition, Omnitek has utilized its signal processing expertise to develop IP solutions that deliver FPGA-market leading performance in AI inferencing.

“From data centers to devices, compute-intensive applications like 8K video and artificial intelligence require a multitude of innovative compute engines. FPGA devices play an increasingly critical role, often complementing other processing architectures, and Intel is at the center of this revolution,” said Roger Fawcett, CEO of Omnitek. “Omnitek is excited and extremely proud to bring our intellectual property and engineers to join the talented team in Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group.”

Why It Matters: Intel is transforming to compete for an expanded, $300 billion-plus market opportunity for silicon, driven by demand for solutions to better manage and extract business value from the explosive growth of data. The market for programmable solutions represents an estimated $8 billion of that opportunity. Many of Intel’s cloud service providers, enterprise and embedded customers utilize FPGAs in video and visual-related applications. With Omnitek, Intel can deliver optimized and highly efficient solutions that improve time-to-market for existing FPGA customers and win new ones in the rapidly expanding opportunity for FPGA-based vision applications.