Recently, Lattice held its first online developer conference, attracting thousands of professional visitors to register. Experts from NVIDIA, BMW, and Meta were also invited to give presentations on the topic of network edge and industrial automation. It is reported that as long as the cooperation with NVIDIA focuses on the edge side, Lattice's FPGA mainly plays the role of a co-processor. In fact, on the edge side, Lattice's FPGAs have always been unique, mainly reflected in low power consumption, small size, agility and long lifecycle. As a result, Lattice's ecosystem has expanded 5-fold since 2018. How to understand this data, let's compare the growth rate of China's FPGA market from 2018 to 2023, of course, the number of ecosystems is not equal to the volume, but it can also relatively reflect the development speed of Lattice.
Source: China's Local FPGA Industry Map (2023 Edition)
In fact, in the past 10 years, there have been 5 billion FPGA devices on the market, more than 50,000 FPGA developers worldwide, and more than 100,000 FPGA-based designs per year, and this number will continue to grow in the future, according to forecasts given by market research institutions, the number of FPGA requirements will double to 10 billion in the next 10 years. It is worth mentioning that although Lattice is the third largest in the global FPGA market, it is the first in terms of the number of shipments. At present, Lattice's main platforms are Nexus and Avant, of which Nexus™™ is a small FPGA platform based on 28nm FD-SOI process, and the more distinctive product is the CrossLink-NX FPGA chip with USB interface, while Avant™™ is a new mid-range FPGA platform launched last year, which is also a landmark product of Lattice's entry into the mid-range FPGA market. From the perspective of FPGA acceleration, compared with the Nexus™ platform, the Avant platform has 5 times more capacity and 10 times more processing bandwidth, so from the perspective of calculating FPGA performance, Avant™™ has also increased 30 times the processing power.
Figure | Lattice's product strategy focuses on the mid-range FPGA market
It is reported that Avant currently has three main products, namely Avant-E, which was released last year, and Avant-G and Avant-X™™™™, which were released recently. In addition, Pu Xiaoshuang, director of on-site technical support at Lattice, revealed: "Lattice will continue to increase its investment in the mid-range FPGA market, and the fourth and fifth chips of the Avant™ platform are also under development. Let's take a look at what are the characteristics of the Avant-G and Avant-X™™ chips?
- ™ Avant-GGAga
Avant-G general-purpose FPGAs enable system scalability to meet a wider range of customer needs by providing seamless, flexible interface bridging and optimized compute. The Lattice Avant-G™ devices offer leading-edge signal processing and AI, flexible I/O, support for a range of system interfaces, and a dedicated LPDDR4 memory interface of 2400 Mbps.
- Lattice Avant-X™ FPGA family
Avant-X™ advanced interconnect FPGAs enable high bandwidth and security, with a feature set tailored to customer needs for signal aggregation and high throughput. The Lattice Avant-X™ device provides up to 1 T/s of total system bandwidth, a PCIe® Gen 4 controller with hardcore DMA, and a security engine for encrypting user data in motion, providing quantum-secure encryption.
According to Pu, the Avant-G and Avant-X™™ will be used for universal design and advanced interconnects, respectively, with the aim of providing low-power, advanced interconnects, and optimized computing power for mid-tier applications in the communications, computing, industrial, and automotive markets.