Lattice inaugurates new India office; to develop ECP5 products

Today, Lattice Semiconductor Corp. announced the official inauguration of Lattice India in a ribbon cutting ceremony in Koramangala, Bangalore, that included Lattice president and CEO, Darin G. Billerbeck, and Lattice India GM, Sidhartha (Sid) Mohanty.Billerbeck noted: "We build mostly custom built products, and in future, we would be building more low cost products. We are now restructuring the company. In fact, we just completed our strategic long-term roadmap (SLR).

He added: If you look at India, we develop low-cost applications over here. It also helps in giving us better communications with customers. It is now an option for India to do hardware design. Some of our products will stay on 65nm for a long time."

In FPGAs, Lattice is strong on the ECP3 family, a third generation high value FPGA, which offers the industry's lowest power consumption and price of any SERDES-capable FPGA device.

The LatticeECP3 FPGA family offers multi-protocol 3.2G SERDES with XAUI jitter compliance, DDR3 memory interfaces, powerful DSP capabilities, high density on-chip memory and up to 149K LUTS, all with half the power consumption and half the price of competitive SERDES-capable FPGAs. The entire LatticeECP3 family is manufactured using Fujitsu's advanced low power process technology.

Billerbeck noted that some of the ECP3 and ECP4 products will stay on the 65nm line. "ECP3 is already in production, while the ECP4 will be next. ECP5 family will come out in the next two years from now, and focus on 28nm."

He added: "We are not in an 'arms race' with the likes of Intel. Xilinx, etc. Our focus: We want to win in the low power. Our value proposition is in low power and communication spaces. We also want to be innovative."

According to him, Altera had a great last year. Even Xilinx can bounce back. Lattice also has much more cash. It can also do acquisitions now, if it so wishes. "People are now looking at new growth opportunities in smaller companies, so that's a great opportunity. Our software team is very good. The guy in San Jose is very good."

Global semicon industry
So, where does Lattice see itself in the global semicon industry? According to Billerbeck, Lattice grew 50 percent last year. "We closed our target at $297 million. This year, our guidance for Q1 was 2-7 percent growth. There are four countries in Europe, which still are in demand from us. The industrial market also seems to be doing well."

According to Billerbeck, China is slowing down, although growth is still positive. Japan could be hampered by three to six months, but they will likely come back strongly.

He added: "We had one fab in Japan, which wasn't affected. We feel comfortable that there won't be any impact on Q2. Some of the folks will be impacted -- both positively and negatively, especially if customers pull out all of the inventory inside a week. So all of that makes Q1 interesting. Q2 won't be as big, but we expect Q3 to be normal."