Lattice held its first developer conference, and the effect was surprisingly good

Lattice has been aggressively growing its ecosystem (especially the developer community) over the past few years to increase its visibility. The company held its first-ever developer conference this week and released a series of new products aimed at attracting more industry partners to choose Lattice products.

Lattice has introduced a new family of mid-range FPGA devices in the Avant product line, including the Lattice Avant-G and Avant-X. Avant-G devices are designed for versatility, providing flexible interface bridging to support more system interfaces and a dedicated 2,400 Mbps LPDDR4 memory interface to enable a wider range of applications such as sensor fusion and processing.

Avant-X leverages advanced high-bandwidth connectivity and security to support signal aggregation and high throughput for demanding applications such as data path networks. Lattice also said its Propel and Radiant software and Glance edge AI software will support Avant-G and Avant-X.

Lattice also announced updates to its FPGA software stack, including the sensAI solution stack, mVision embedded vision stack, Lattice Sentry security stack and Lattice Automate stack for factory automation applications. 

Jay Aggrawal, director of silicon product marketing at Lattice, said the company's ecosystem has experienced more than five-fold growth in the past five years. This has occurred against the backdrop of increased demand from the global FPGA market, which has grown significantly over the past five years. The demand for FPGAs is approximately 5 billion units and may reach 10 billion units within the next 10 years. But Lattice's success in the broader market is also due to its efforts to introduce industry-specific and use-case-specific tools and software to help guide developers' application and product activities.

"We believe there are over 50,000 developers around the world using FPGAs today, and in terms of design launches, we are doing up to 100,000 design launches per year using FPGAs," he said. "So we're seeing a huge growth in the use of silicon programmable logic overall, which is really driven by the fundamental capabilities that programmable logic provides - faster time to market and faster time-to-market due to the reprogrammability of FPGAs. Agility.”

This week’s event showcases how developers are using these FPGAs in areas such as automotive and robotics, while also showcasing the partner portion of the Lattice ecosystem. Speakers include executives from companies such as Meta, Nvidia and BMW Group.

Nvidia was present at the event, and Lattice also announced a new collaboration with the semiconductor giant on sensor bridging solutions. Aggrawal said Lattice FPGAs are integrated with Nvidia's Jetson Orin and IGX Orin platforms into a new open source reference board, which will improve the efficiency of connecting various sensors in edge artificial intelligence applications.

A reference board based on Lattice FPGAs is now available to early access customers, and the company plans to make the board and application examples available in the first half of 2024.