Lattice Semiconductor
Powering The Future With Innovative FPGAs

Jim Anderson, CEO and President

This statement by Greek philosopher Heraclitus continues to ring true over 2,500 years later. And, nowhere is this truer than in the technology industry, where firms are constantly researching newer ways to deliver breakthrough products.

Today, organizations across the board are seeking ways to increase their ability to remain nimble in their system and application designs in hopes of staying one step ahead of this insatiable hunger for innovation.

At the forefront of this movement toward more flexible design is Lattice Semiconductor, which offers an ever-growing portfolio of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and software solutions for communications, computing, industrial, automotive, and consumer applications. By nature, FPGAs are unique in the semiconductor industry because of their programmability (and re-programmability) throughout their lifetime, making them a natural choice for those looking to future-proof their designs for applications including artificial intelligence, Edge computing, embedded vision, automation, and security.

Conquering the Small FPGA Segment

Lattice Semiconductor provides unrivaled innovation leadership through the Lattice Nexus™ FPGA platform, which combines decades of low-power FPGA design expertise with 28nm FD-SOI process manufacturing technology. Nexus enabled the rapid development of multiple device families that offer industry-leading low power, high performance, and high reliability in a small form factor.

Lattice designed the Nexus platform to deliver three levels of innovation: circuit, architecture, and solutions. The platform enabled them to then create multiple families of FPGA devices that consume 75 percent less power than conventional small-size FPGAs and minimize the soft error rate by 100 times, compared to the bulk process. With respect to architecture, the chipsets based on the Nexus platform have large RAM blocks embedded into their design, which drive the seamless implementation of standard AI algorithms. It is proven to deliver complete solutions with IP, reference designs, and software stacks, enabling customers to bring their final product to the market in a highly compliant manner and at record speeds.

Bringing Unmatched Innovation to Mid-Range FPGAs

Since the launch of Nexus, Lattice Semiconductor has continually developed new solutions and helped numerous customers turn their forward-looking technology concepts into state-of-the-art products.

The Lattice Avant FPGA platform is the new golden standard for low-power and small form factor mid-range FPGA families. The platform is based on 16nm FinFET technology and features class-leading 25 Gbps SERDES, hardened PCI Express and external memory PHY interfaces, and high DSP counts for the latest AI/ML and computer vision algorithms.

“Avant delivers FPGAs with two and a half times better power efficiency, twice the bandwidth, and up to six times smaller form factor size than our competition,” says Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor.

These core capabilities allow Avant to bring revolutionary benefits to system and application engineers, helping them achieve desired power efficiency, simplify thermal management, and lower operating costs. The platform also combines its unparalleled power efficiency, size, and performance with an optimized feature set to solve key challenges hindering Edge applications like data processing and AI, which are critical in automotive applications. From a performance perspective, FPGAs produced using Avant showcase twice as fast throughput at lower power consumption, driving better bandwidth and reduced system cost and size.

Accelerating Customer Applications through Dedicated Software Stacks and Tools

One of Lattice Semiconductor’s core pillars is its innovation strategy geared toward long-term, customer-centric product development, which has driven its success over four decades. This strategy is what led to the development of a robust portfolio of application-specific solution stacks, which today comprises of Lattice sensAI™, Lattice mVision™, Lattice Sentry™, Lattice ORAN™, and Lattice Automate™. Each of these solution stacks combines hardware, software, and IP tools tailored to the needs of specific applications, from Edge AI, embedded vision, security, factory automation, and communications infrastructure, respectively. With these complete solutions, Lattice enables its customers to more easily evaluate, develop, and deploy FPGA-based systems and applications so they can get to market more quickly.

Lattice also offers a suite of easy-to-use software development tools, Lattice Radiant™, Lattice Propel™, and Lattice Diamond™ that are designed to make it easy for application and platform developers to create Lattice FPGA-based designs, even if they’re doing so for the first time.

A Culture of Customer-Driven Innovation

Setting Lattice apart is its emphasis on incorporating customer input while developing hardware and software solutions. Its focus on consistently developing solutions that address customers’ prevalent challenges is a crucial component of Nexus and Avant and their ability to deliver FPGAs that drive the creation of highly differentiated systems. Elaborating on the impact of Lattice Semiconductor’s FPGAs in a real-world scenario, Esam Elashmawi, chief strategy and marketing officer, describes how lower power consumption and enhanced bandwidth can help in a modern factory setting.

Lattice Semiconductor FPGAs also exhibit enhanced bandwidth, assisting customers in adding more intelligence into their systems via faster and safer data transfer and cross-device connectivity. The smaller form factor of the chipsets supports the development of sleeker and lighter systems without compromising on the feature sets that traditionally require a larger physical size, he said.

At the heart of Lattice Semiconductor’s far-reaching accomplishments is its highly competent and passionate workforce that follows a five-pronged approach to their day-to-day tasks, comprising agility, boldness, innovation, collaboration, and integrity.

Following these tenets, the team works closely with each other and with Lattice’s customers to stay on top of the prevalent challenges and latest developments in the technology industry. This allows them to develop solutions geared toward resolving genuine customer needs using their proven technologies. The company’s customer engagements are further strengthened by the team’s combined expertise not only in FPGAs, but also in the core customer segments it services. This helps drive closer customer intimacy and enables a smoother assessment of their challenges, acting as a link between a customer’s issues and the product development team.

“Our team leverages their experience as system architects and deep knowledge of our end markets to speak the language of our customers so we can achieve a deeper understanding of the true nature of their challenges and help solve them with the right combination of hardware and software solutions,” states Elashmawi.

Enroute to a Bright Future

Lattice Semiconductor is on a growth path, with the team at its helm laser-focused on growing the company through the expansion of its silicon devices and application-specific solution stack portfolio. It recently expanded its global footprint into Malaysia by opening an office in Penang and gained a new team in Canada through its acquisition of Montreal-based computer vision company, Mirametrix. It also opened a new office in Austin, Texas, which is poised to help it support more organizations in the central U.S.

Moving forward, Lattice Semiconductor plans to continue expanding its innovative product portfolio to assist customers with their design challenges and desires to find new ways to deliver breakthrough products. At its recent launch event for the Lattice Avant platform, they made it very clear that, despite their position as the FPGA industry leader today, they’re just getting started and are committed to delivering more innovation to the market in the years to come.