Prototype to Production
Lattice Launches FreedomChip

From about the time of the announcement of their foundry partnership with Fujitsu, Lattice Semiconductor has been doing things a little differently.  Step by step, they’ve been establishing a real, credible presence in the fast-expanding FPGA market.  Prior to that, their FPGA-related efforts had been less than stellar, and the company had survived on a strong heritage of CPLD offerings.

After establishing an FPGA beachhead with a competitive array of 130nm low-cost FPGA families, the company shoved their way into the elite 90nm FPGA race with a full line of well differentiated low-cost and high-end offerings.  During that span, two products – the non-volatile flash/SRAM Lattice XP and the low-cost-serdes-havin’ ECP2M -- have stood out as clear concept leaders, attracting significant industry attention with their mold-breaking, market-making features.

Comparative quiet was the reception of their highly-capable LatticeSC high-end 90nm FPGA family.  A stand-up competitor in its own right, it needed time to build the market momentum of heavily-marketed rivals like Xilinx’s Virtex-4 and Altera’s Stratix II.  SC, however, had a couple of “to be announced later” features up its sleeve – the hard IP landing-zone for what the company calls “Maco” blocks and a cost-reduction strategy announced this week called “FreedomChip”.  [more]