IC: Most users who know about Lattice understand that it's an FPGA company, but when most of us speak about FPGAs, we refer to the big names in the industry: Xilinx and Altera (which is now part of Intel). We have some really great products on the roadmap. We've completely rebuilt the product line at Lattice, we're on a great trajectory, and actually, I'm even more excited about the years to come. So that's kind of what attracted me to Lattice and the last three years have been a lot of fun. I felt like if I joined Lattice that I could help it get on a stronger path moving forward, help it build better products, and build products more quickly.
Those devices go into all sorts of applications across many different markets. It's a company that's been around for about 40 years, it's got a great history of innovation, and it’s kind of a unique place that innovates and innovates around small and really power efficient FPGAs. I love the products.īut when Lattice reached out to me, it was kind of hard to pass up the opportunity, because Lattice is a company that's one of the original founding FPGA companies from the early 80s. I'm a product guy - I always have passion about the product, and in particular that product we were launching that day back in Italy, I was always super excited about. Great people, really innovative, very determined. I was super happy there - I love the people at AMD. Ian Cutress: You’ve now been CEO of Lattice for three years, and coming from the position of SVP of AMD’s Computing and Graphics business group, what made you make the jump from consumer hardware to power-efficient FPGAs? Now he is three years into the role of CEO at Lattice. Academically he holds a MS in EE and CS from MIT and an MBA from MIT, and in his career he spent 8 years at Intel as a CPU architect on Xeon and Itanium along with strategic planning, 8 years at LSI in strategic planning and marketing of network components, a year at Axxia/Intel as the GM of Networking, and then 3 years at AMD leading up Ryzen. I thought this would be a good time to reconnect with Jim to find out exactly what he’s doing at Lattice to earmark the next generation of growth at this foundational FPGA company.įrom a career standpoint, Jim has a lot of experience. The recent financial disclosures at Lattice show an increasing demand for its hardware, as well as the company making strides to double its addressable market over the next five years.
Over those three years at Lattice, Jim has initiated a cultural shift that is playing out in the company roadmaps – new products, a more agile approach, and a need to focus on enabling machine learning at every part of its product stack. When it was announced he took the role of CEO at Lattice, I was a little taken aback, but glad that he had found a new challenge the complemented his background in semiconductor design and expertise. Jim and I met frequently at AMD events and we spoke at depth at the state of the consumer product landscape as well as how the semiconductor space was evolving. It hired Jim Anderson, the then AMD SVP of Computing and Graphics who had overseen the launch of Ryzen, the brand of processors that has re-energized the company from near bankruptcy to a number of years of extended market share growth and profitability. We’ve been loosely following Lattice for a number of years, however three years ago the company went through a bit of a change. One of the first FPGA companies on the market was Lattice Semiconductor, which now focuses on small power efficient FPGA designs that end up in everything from consumer devices to servers.
#LATTICE CHIPS FULL#
This means an FPGA can be used to design and simulate a full CPU or GPU, but also an FPGA offers a reconfigurable way to offer optimized compute power that adapts to the needs of its users without the cost of millions or tens of millions to design dedicated silicon.
What ties all of these products together is actually the FPGA - a field programmable gate array that allows a skilled technician to essentially build a custom circuit out of configurable gates. Beyond that, we look at FPGAs, microcontrollers, and this decade is bringing the advent of the dedicated AI processor. In our coverage of the semiconductor space, we typically think of two main vectors of hardware – the CPU and the GPU.
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