Intel recently announced the acquisition of Omnitek, a provider of video and visual FPGA IP solutions. Omnitek's technology enables custom high-performance vision and artificial intelligence (AI) reasoning on FPGAs to meet customer needs in end markets such as video conferencing, projection and display, and medical vision systems.

Omnitek was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Basingstoke, England. The company has developed more than 220 FPGA IP cores and companion software, including high-performance solutions for WARP, ISP processing and video connectivity, helping customers significantly accelerate time-to-market. It also enables new customers who do not have FPGA expertise to implement customized, integrated, and efficient solutions on FPGAs. In addition, Omnitek uses signal processing expertise to develop IP solutions designed to deliver FPGA market-leading performance for artificial intelligence reasoning.

Dan McNamara, Intel's senior vice president and general manager of the Programmable Solutions Group, points out that Omnitek's technology is a powerful complement to Intel's FPGA business. They have a wealth of system-level FPGA expertise and high-performance video and vision-related technologies that are trusted partners for many of Intel's customers. By working together, Intel will provide leading FPGA solutions for video, visual and artificial intelligence inference applications, speeding time to market, maintaining existing customers while winning more new customers.

Intel pointed out that users require solutions to better manage the surge of data and gain business value from it. To meet this demand, Intel is actively transforming. The market value of programmable solutions is approximately $8 billion, which is a huge opportunity.

Many Intel cloud service providers, enterprise and embedded customers use FPGAs in video and vision-related applications. With the acquisition of Omnitek, Intel can provide optimized and efficient solutions to help existing FPGA customers accelerate time to market. At the same time, FPGA-based vision applications will be a huge opportunity, and Intel will use this merger to win more new customers.