Lattice Sees No End to FPGA Growth

For many years, Lattice Semiconductor was known as a leader in smaller, low-power FPGAs, containing under 100,000 logic cells. But over the past year, the company has started moving aggressively into the mid-range FPGAs, containing 100,000 to 500,000 logic cells.

At the company’s Developer’s Conference, Lattice continued to move into the mid-range FPGA market, announcing two FPGAs called the Avant-G and Avant-X, to accommodate increasing demand for applications across the communications, computing, industrial, and automotive markets.

“Our ecosystem has grown substantially since 2018,” said Jay (Anuj) Aggarwal, Director of Silicon Product Marketing for Lattice, in a recent interview with Design News. “There is increasing demand globally for FPGAs.” According to the company, Lattice now serves over 50,000 FPGA developers globally and over 100,000 FPGA design starts annually.

Aggarwal noted that FPGAs give designers the flexibility to quickly develop products to meet various application needs, and the ability to be reprogrammed. He added that trends such as edge AI, sensor-to-cloud connectivity, and resilient security lend themselves to using FPGAs.

Lattice’s new Avant-G FPGAs are general-purpose, mid-range FPGAs that offer flexible I/O to support a range of system interfaces, including dedicated LPDDR4 memory interfaces at 2400 Mbps. They deliver 12.5G SERDES with support for up to PCIe® Gen 3 and 10G Ethernet.

The other new FPGAs, the Avant-X, provide up to 1 Terabit per second total system bandwidth, 25G SERDES supporting up to PCIe® Gen 4 and 25G Ethernet, along with support for DDR5, DDR4, and LPDDR4 memories and advanced user-logic accessible security to encrypt user data in motion.

In addition to the FPGAs, Lattice also announced new versions of its application-specific solution stacks for artificial intelligence (AI), embedded vision, security, and factory automation, each of which are expanded with new features and capabilities to help accelerate customer time-to-market. The company also released updated versions of its software tools and Glance by Mirametrix® computer vision software.

While Lattice continues expanding its mid-range FPGA family, Aggarwal noted that the company is not ignoring its low-power FPGA platform, known as Nexus. The company plans to continue expanding the Nexus family with additional products.

Lattice is now sampling the new FPGAs.