Intel, after a couple of months of negotiation, has agreed to buy Altera for $16.7 billion (£11 billion) in cash.

The acquisition comes just a few days after Avago announced its $37 billion acquisition of Broadcom, the largest deal ever seen by the tech sector. The timing is probably not coincidental: Intel and Altera had reportedly been in talks since March.

Much like the Avago-Broadcom deal, Intel-Altera is a consolidation move. Altera is the second largest maker of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and other programmable logic devices (PLDs) behind Xilinx. Intel makes a wide range of chips, but has only ever dabbled in FPGAs. Buying Altera will let Intel sell a wider variety of chips through its existing sales channels, while also potentially realising some savings through strategic job cuts.

Intel has actually worked with Altera for a few years. Back in 2013, Intel surprised everyone by opening up its fabs and becoming a foundry. Intel worked with a few fabless companies to bring their chips over to its advanced 22nm and 14nm processes, including Altera.

Later, in 2014, Intel announced a new Xeon chip with a built-in FPGA; no tech details were ever revealed, but it was likely an Altera FPGA. Along with the additional revenues and cost cutting from consolidation, Intel may use the Altera acquisition to bring integrated FPGAs to more of its CPU products—though given the cost of producing an FPGA (they are very large), we probably won't be seeing FPGAs in consumer products any time soon.

Both the Intel and Altera boards have approved the $16.7 billion acquisition, with Intel expecting the deal to close within six to nine months.