Lattice Semiconductor Corporation and its subsidiaries (Lattice) develop technologies that the company monetizes through differentiated programmable logic semiconductor products, system solutions, design services, and licenses.
Lattice is the low power programmable leader. The company solves customer problems across the network, from the Edge to the Cloud, in the Communications, Computing, Industrial, Automotive, and Consumer markets. The company’s technology, long-standing relationships, and c...
Lattice Semiconductor Corporation and its subsidiaries (Lattice) develop technologies that the company monetizes through differentiated programmable logic semiconductor products, system solutions, design services, and licenses.
Lattice is the low power programmable leader. The company solves customer problems across the network, from the Edge to the Cloud, in the Communications, Computing, Industrial, Automotive, and Consumer markets. The company’s technology, long-standing relationships, and commitment to world-class support enable the company’s customers to create a smart, secure, and connected world.
The company’s field programmable gate array (‘FPGA’) devices enable the company to provide its customers with a strong, growing base of control, connect, and compute technologies. There are multiple growth areas that will allow the company to increase its addressable market. In particular, there are several emerging trends in servers, infrastructure, and smart devices that are opportunities for Lattice:
With the growth of hyperscale data-centers, the company’s ‘processor agnostic’ solutions are ideal for dataplane, control, and connect functions in enterprise and data-center server applications.
With the expected continued Communications infrastructure build-out from 5G deployment and beyond, as well as continued data-center network expansion, Lattice solutions are being adopted to control and connect a variety of functions in critical systems.
With the increase in electrification and the proliferation of sensors in smart factories, smart homes, and automobiles, the company’s low power, small form factor solutions are ideal for everything from battery powered systems and sensor applications to embedded vision.
With the increase in artificial intelligence (AI) and a multitude of applications at the network edge, Lattice devices support applications like face detection, image recognition, and video analytics.
With the demand for more hardware security in the Communications, Computing, Industrial, Automotive, and Consumer markets, the company’s devices provide enhanced platform security.
To serve these needs, customer solutions require power efficiency, memory bandwidth, processing power, and the ability to integrate complex functionality into a highly compact footprint. These requirements align with the capabilities of the company’s FPGA devices. The company’s flexible, low power, small form factor, performance optimized FPGAs put the company in a unique position to meet these growing market needs.
Markets and Customers
The company sells its products globally in three end market groups: Communications and Computing, Industrial and Automotive, and Consumer. The company also provides Intellectual Property (IP) licensing and services to these end markets.
In the Communications and Computing Market, the company’s solutions play key roles in computing systems, such as servers and client devices, 5G wireless infrastructure, switches, routers, and other related applications.
The company’s Communications and Computing customers need to address a variety of challenges.
As server architectures become increasingly complex, customers need simplified control logic, enhanced hardware platform security, system status monitoring, and rigorous power and thermal management.
As client compute devices become smaller and smarter, there is a need for small form factor devices with power efficiency to interface with a variety of sensors and add intelligence.
Networks typically require progressively higher bandwidth and increased reliability as more data is demanded by connected devices, and increasingly require more security as providers embrace disaggregation and openness with the adoption of open radio access networks (ORAN).
As wireless cellular sites become more compact, there is a growing requirement for smaller form factors optimized for low power consumption and thermal management.
Lattice FPGAs help solve these customer problems. The company’s FPGAs are optimized for input/output (‘I/O’) expansion, hardware acceleration, ‘first-on, last-off’ hardware security, and hardware management. The company’s FPGAs consume power at very low rates, which reduces operating costs. Their small form factor enables higher functional density in less space. Finally, the company’s FPGAs are I/O rich, which allows for more connections with system application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and application specific standard products (ASSPs).
Examples of where the company’s products enable intelligent automation in the Industrial and Automotive Market include industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and ‘Industry 4.0’, machine vision, robotics, factory automation, advanced driver assistance systems (‘ADAS’), and automotive infotainment.
The company’s Industrial and Automotive customers has many opportunities to use technology to increase automation, efficiency, and productivity:
As factories automate to improve efficiency and employee safety, sensors, machine vision, and robotics are proliferating, in turn requiring increasing amounts of data to be gathered, connected, and processed.
Automobiles and other forms of transportation are also becoming smarter and more connected. Drivers and passengers are demanding better in-cabin experiences, including entertainment, diagnostics, and enhanced safety — often involving multiple displays, cameras, and sensors.
As factories and automotive manufacturers continue their evolution of computerization, power reduction, system security, faster time to design-in and market, lower costs are becoming increasingly essential.
The company’s product portfolio helps provide solutions that benefit its customers. The company’s small-sized, low power FPGAs not only provide the I/O expansion, bridging, connectivity, and processing inherent in FPGAs, but they also form the backbone of several integrated solutions, including hardware-based security, motor control, complete High Definition (HD) camera and Digital Video Recorder (DVR) solutions on a single FPGA device, and Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI) on a chip. Furthermore, the company’s FPGAs are adjacent to the sensors in industrial and automotive, enabling its customers to run their ‘far edge’ AI models and workloads at low latency.
In the Consumer Market, the company offers smart home devices, prosumer devices, sound bars, high end projectors, Augmented Reality (‘AR’) / Virtual Reality (‘VR’), and wearables.
The company’s Consumer customers are driven by the need to deliver richer and more responsive experiences.
Lattice FPGAs brings multiple benefits to these customers. An FPGA’s parallel architecture enables faster processing than competing devices, such as microcontrollers, allowing for a user experience with shorter pauses and fewer delays. The company’s FPGAs are among the most power efficient in the industry, enabling the application processor and other high-power components to remain dormant longer, resulting in longer battery life. Finally, with some of the industry’s smallest packages, the company enable thinner and more compact end products.
The company’s proprietary solutions help its customers get their products to market faster than typical development cycles of custom ASICs. With re-programmability and flexibility, the company’s FPGAs inherently allow its customers to have quicker product development. The time-to-market advantages of Lattice's solutions are critical given the shorter product life cycles in its customers’ end markets.
Products and Services
The company is focused on delivering FPGAs and related solutions to help solve the company’s customers' problems. The company also serves its customers with IP licensing and various other services.
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (‘FPGAs’)
FPGAs are regular arrays of logic that can be custom-configured by the user through software. This programmability allows the company’s customers flexibility and reduced time to market while allowing the company to offer the chips to many different customers in many different markets.
Lattice has taken a platform approach to accelerate time to market when developing product families of FPGAs. This approach enables Lattice to create one foundational platform that is the basis multiple FPGA product families. Lattice FPGA platforms, and their related FPGA product families, are segmented into small and mid-range categories.
Lattice small FPGA platforms: Lattice’s small FPGA platforms include Lattice Nexus, which was introduced in 2019, and Lattice Nexus 2, introduced in 2024. The Lattice Nexus FPGA platform combines Lattice’s long-standing low power FPGA expertise with leading 28nm fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (‘FD-SOI’) semiconductor manufacturing technology to deliver industry leading low power, high performance, high reliability and small form factor. Lattice Nexus 2 builds on the company’s small FPGA leadership, offering significant improvements in power and performance efficiency, advanced connectivity, and leading security relative to the competition. Typical logic capacity for small FPGAs can go up to 150K LUTS (‘Look up tables’).
Lattice mid-range FPGA platform: Lattice’s mid-range FPGA platform, Lattice Avant, was introduced in 2022. The Lattice Avant 16nm FinFET platform is purpose-built to bring the company’s power efficient architecture, small size, and performance leadership to mid-range FPGAs, offering best-in-class power efficiency, advanced connectivity, and optimized compute. Lattice mid-range FPGAs can extend from 150K LUTS to 500K LUTS.
Based on these platforms, Lattice provides general purpose function FPGAs and specialized FPGAs optimized for specific applications.
General Purpose FPGAs:
The Lattice Avant-G, Certus and Lattice ECP device families are the company’s ‘General Purpose FPGAs’ and address a broad range of applications across multiple markets. They offer customers the optimal cost per gate, Digital Signal Processing (‘DSP’) capability, and Serialize-Deserialize (‘SERDES’) connectivity. ECP devices are optimized for the Communications and Computing market but also find significant use in the Industrial, Automotive, and Consumer markets. The latest introduction in the company’s general purpose family, Lattice Certus-N2 FPGAs, are designed to solve key customer challenges by combining advanced connectivity, optimized power and performance, leading security, and small size, with an optimized feature set tailored to the needs of a wide range of small FPGA applications like system expandability, secure bridging, and AI enablement.
The Lattice Avant-E, Avant-G, and Avant-X device families are the company’s ‘low power edge and advanced connectivity mid-range FPGAs’ optimized for applications in Industrial, Automotive, Communications and Compute markets providing low power, small form factor, and advanced security. The Avant-X device family is the latest purpose-built mid-range FPGA with 25G SERDES supporting multi protocols, including 25G Ethernet and PCIe 4.0 which are widely used in communications and high speed industrial applications.
Specialized FPGAs
The Lattice Mach device family are the company’s ‘Control & Security small FPGAs’ and are designed for platform management and security applications. They are control-oriented and offer optimized cost per I/O and cost per look-up table. Mach FPGAs are widely used across the company’s three end market groups: Communications and Computing, Industrial and Automotive, and Consumer. The Lattice MachXO5D-NX family, the latest devices built on the award-winning Lattice Nexus platform are the newest addition to the Mach FPGA family. They extend Lattice’s long-standing leadership in secure control FPGAs, offering crypto-agile algorithms, hardware root of trust features with integrated flash, and fail-safe remote field updates for reliable and secure product lifecycle management.
The Lattice iCE device family are the company’s ‘Ultra Low Power small FPGAs.’ Their small size and ultra-low power make them the optimal products for each of the company’s core segments where small form factor and customizing is required. The latest member of the family, the iCE40 UltraPlus device, is focused on IoT Edge devices with its AI capabilities, low power, and small form factor.
The Lattice CrossLink device family are the company’s ‘Video Connectivity small FPGAs’ and are optimized for high-speed video and sensor applications for the Industrial, Automotive, Communications, Computing, and Consumer markets. CrossLink combines the power and speed benefits of hardened video camera and display bridging cores with the flexibility of FPGA fabric and Lattice CrossLinkPlus devices provide users with instant-on capabilities for video display. Lattice CrossLink-NX FPGAs, built on the Lattice Nexus platform, provide the lowest power in the smallest packages in their class, higher performance, and high reliability. The latest device family – Lattice CrossLinkU-NX – are the industry’s first FPGAs with integrated USB device functionality in their class, designed to meet growing customer needs to simplify USB-based design for applications across the Computing, Industrial, Automotive, and Consumer markets.
To enable the company’s customers to get to market faster, the company supports its FPGAs with IP cores, reference designs, development kits, and design software. The company is investing in its design software, such as Lattice Radiant, to deliver best-in-class tools that enable predictable design convergence, and Lattice Propel for unparalleled ease in creating embedded processor-based designs. The company has developed integrated system-level solution stacks, including Lattice Automate for industrial automation and robotics, Lattice mVision for low power embedded vision, Lattice ORAN for robust control data security, flexible fronthaul synchronization, and low power hardware acceleration for secure, adaptable, ORAN deployment, Lattice sensAI for Edge AI applications, Lattice Sentry for implementing hardware security, and the company’s newest solution stack - Lattice Drive for advanced, flexible automotive system designs and applications. Further, the company has edge AI application software, such as Glance by Mirametrix that allows users to control the AI and computer vision experiences for a variety of edge applications, including client computing, industrial, and automotive applications.
Legacy Semiconductor Products
The company also sells Video Connectivity ASSPs.
IP Licensing and Services
Lattice has a broad set of technological capabilities and many U.S. and international patents. The company generates revenue from its technology portfolio via upfront fees and on-going royalty payments through the following activities:
Standard IP Licensing - These activities include the company’s participation in two consortia for the licensing of High-Definition Multimedia Interface (‘HDMI’) and Mobile High-Definition Link (‘MHL’) standard technologies to customers who adopt the technology into their products and voluntarily report their usage and royalties. The royalties are split among consortium members, including the company.
IP Core Licensing - Some customers need Lattice’s technology for specific functions or features, but for various reasons are not able to use the company’s silicon solutions. In those cases, the company may license its IP cores, which they can integrate into their own ASICs. In contrast to the use of consortia, these licensing activities are generally performed internally.
Patent Monetization - The company considers sales of certain patents from its portfolio generally for technology. The revenue from these sales generally consists of upfront payments and potential future royalties.
IP Services - The company undergoes projects and design services for customers who wish to develop specific solutions that harness the company’s proven technology and expertise.
Operations
The company operates primarily as a fabless semiconductor provider and, therefore, it maintains strategic relationships with large, established semiconductor foundries to source its finished silicon wafers and manufacture its silicon products. This strategy allows it to focus its internal resources on product and market development. The company is able to take advantage of the ongoing advanced process technology development efforts of semiconductor foundries and apply those technologies when they become most economically beneficial to the company and to its customers.
The company relies on third party vendors to provide supply chain services. Among other activities, these outsourced services relate to inventory management and warehousing, lead time management, order fulfillment, and the shipment of inventory to third party distributors.
Wafer Fabrication
Lattice partners with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (‘TSMC’) to develop and manufacture on 16nm technology, which is used in the company’s Avant platform of FPGA products, and to manufacture its 350nm, 130nm, 55nm, and 40nm products. The company partners with Samsung Semiconductor (‘Samsung’) to develop and manufacture the first low-power FPGA on 28nm FD-SOI technology, which is used in the company’s Nexus platform of FPGA products. The company partners with United Microelectronics Corporation (‘UMC’) and its subsidiary United Semiconductor Japan Corporation (‘USJC’) to manufacture the company’s products on its 130nm, 90nm, 65nm, and 40nm CMOS process technologies, as well as embedded flash memory in these process nodes. The company partners with Seiko Epson (‘Epson’) to manufacture its 500nm, 350nm, 250nm, and 180nm products.
The company sources silicon wafers from its foundry partners, TSMC, Samsung, UMC, USJC, and Epson, pursuant to agreements with each company and their respective affiliates.
Assembly
All of the company’s assembly and test operations are performed by industry-leading outsourced assembly and test suppliers (‘OSATs’) with the company’s primary supplier being Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, Inc. (‘ASE’). The company performs certain test operations, as well as reliability and quality assurance processes internally during the development process. The company has achieved and maintained ISO9001:2015 Quality Management Systems Certification and released a line of products qualified to the AEC-Q100 Reliability Standard in the support of Automotive product offerings in addition to ISO26262 certification on both Automotive products and software.
After wafer fabrication and initial testing, the company ships wafers to independent subcontractors for assembly. During assembly, wafers are separated into individual die and encapsulated in plastic packages. The company has qualified two major assembly partners, ASE and Amkor Technology (‘Amkor’) and are second sourced where volume and customer requirements are necessary. All ASE and Amkor manufacturing of the company’s products is in Asia.
The company offers an extensive list of standard products in lead (Pb) free packaging. The company’s lead-free products meet the European Parliament Directive entitled ‘Restrictions on the use of Hazardous Substances’ (‘RoHS’). A select and growing subset of the company’s RoHS compliant products are also offered with a ‘Halogen Free’ material set.
Testing (Sort and Final Test)
The company electrically sort tests the die on most wafers prior to shipment for assembly. Wafer sort testing is primarily performed by ASE in Taiwan and Malaysia, Amkor in Japan, and the company’s second source, King Yuan Electronics Co. (‘KYEC’) in Taiwan.
Following assembly, but prior to customer shipment, each product undergoes final testing and quality assurance procedures. Final testing is performed by ASE and Amkor.
Sales and Revenue
The company generates revenue by monetizing its technology designs and patents through product and technology sales. This involves distribution channel and direct sales of silicon-based hardware and silicon-enabling products, as well as the licensing or sale of IP that the company has developed or acquired, some of which the company uses in its products, and certain design services that the company may provide.
Sales and Customers
The company primarily sells its products to customers from Lattice Semiconductor Corporation or the company’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Lattice SG Pte. Ltd. Independent distributors are significant customers, and a substantial portion of the company’s sales are made into this channel. Additionally, the company sells both directly and through a network of independent manufacturers' representatives. The company also employs a direct sales management and field applications engineering organization to support the company’s end customers and indirect sales resources. End customers for the company’s products are primarily Original Equipment Manufacturers (‘OEMs’) in the Communications and Computing, Industrial and Automotive, and Consumer end markets. The company’s sales team attempts to drive multi-generational design wins within these OEMs and leverages the company’s distribution partners to grow the company’s broad customer base.
The company provides global technical support to its end customers with engineering staff based at the company’s headquarters, product development centers, and selected field sales offices. The company maintains numerous domestic and international field sales offices in major metropolitan areas.
In the year ended December 28, 2024 (fiscal year 2024), sales to distributors accounted for approximately 89% of the company’s net revenue. The company depends on its distributors to sell its products to end customers, complete order fulfillment, and maintain sufficient inventory of the company’s products. The company’s distributors also provide technical support and other value-added services to its end customers. The company has one global distributor, and it also has regional distribution in Asia, Japan, Europe, and Israel. Additionally, the company sells through three major on-line distributors. Revenue from foreign sales as a percentage of total revenue was 82% for fiscal 2024 (year ended December 28, 2024).
Seasonality
The company periodically experiences variability in its sales volumes and financial results due to seasonal trends in the end markets it serves, the cyclical nature of the semiconductor industry, and general economic conditions.
IP and Patents
The company holds numerous United States and international patents and has patent applications pending in the United States and internationally. The company’s patents will expire at various times over the next 20 years.
History
Lattice Semiconductor Corporation was founded in 1983. The company was incorporated in 1983.
