UPCOMING WEBCASTS Register today for the first-ever Journal Webcast, sponsored by Lattice Semiconductor. FPGA and Structured ASIC Journal's Amelia Dalton will host Lattice Semiconductor who will explain how to take your design performance to the extreme with the new LatticeSC high-performance FPGA family. To register, click here

Lattice Joins the Fray
New 90nm LatticeSC Hits the High End

The elite party of 90nm high-performance FPGA suppliers has just been crashed. The two big burly guards at the entrance to the VIP room were evidently not paying attention, because Lattice Semiconductor just waltzed right in – as if anybody that wanted to could whip up an FPGA family with 3.4Gbps SerDes transceivers, 2Gbps parallel I/O, up to 115K LUTs, loads of hard IP, and up to 500MHz fabric performance. Did nobody notice those 300mm wafers in their pockets?

For about a year now, only Xilinx and Altera have claimed turf in the 90nm FPGA arena. For much longer than that, Xilinx and Altera have been the only companies with devices that were serious competitors in the "high-end" FPGA race. The high-end devices really have defined the FPGA market for most of its history. Everybody not producing the densest, fastest devices was a niche player. Now, with the explosive growth in the low-cost/high-volume FPGA market (which Lattice is also crashing with their newly announced LatticeECP2 90nm family – more on that next week), high-end is only one of the major FPGA plays, but it is still vitally important.

Lattice's new family is being announced about a year behind the more established competitors, but the time lag isn't what one might first think. While the other suppliers announced their lines long ago, nobody is yet fully in volume production with a high-end 90nm line. Some members of competitors' 90nm families are shipping, but there are still rumored to be yield and delivery problems on others, and still others are listed as not yet in production. Given Lattice's track record of short announcement to delivery times, they may be ready for true volume delivery much closer to their competitors than the announcement dates would indicate. [more]