Lattice Developers Conference Key Insights!
What’s the latest in Edge AI innovation from Lattice Semiconductor? Hosts Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead are joined by Lattice Semiconductor’s CEO, Ford Tamer, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, Esam Elashmawi, and CVP of Product Marketing and Planning, Dan Mansur, for a conversation on Lattice Semiconductor’s strategic growth, key announcements, and unique market position in the Edge AI sector on this episode of Six Five On The Road at Lattice DevCon 2024.
Highlights include ⤵️
- Ford Tamer’s insights and experiences since joining Lattice.
- Lattice’s growth strategy and the strengths driving this growth.
- Key product announcements and solutions introduced at the DevCon.
- The unique position of Lattice FPGA’s in the burgeoning Edge AI market.
- An introduction to Nexus 2 and continued investment in small FPGAs.
Learn more at Lattice Semiconductor and watch Lattice Developers Conference.
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Disclaimer: Six Five On The Road at Lattice DevCon 2024 is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded, but please do not take anything as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors.
Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On The Road here in Silicon Valley and we are at Lattice’s 2024 Developer Conference. Dan, it’s great to be back. Second year here and man, I just love product announcements, I love partner announcements, some great stuff announced today.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, and the developer ecosystem is so important. We know it’s been such a big year for artificial intelligence. We know that it’s such a big opportunity right now and companies really are looking at how they are building, developing, delivering solutions. And I’m always impressed when I spend time with the folks at Lattice Semiconductor. It was a great morning, the keynotes were really, really enjoyable. It was great to hear from their new CEO, Ford Tamer. And it was also just really exciting to see all the partners, all the excitement, all the enthusiasm. It was a great crowd, Pat, and I’m really glad to be here again.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it was, and it’s pretty cool. Been researching the company for years and I like to joke that Lattice made FPGAs cool, right? Very few people knew what they could do in mass and they combined the right software, particularly when it came to AI on the edge, also in the data center, telco carrier robotics pretty much everywhere. So a very pervasive company in some of the most important things out here. So let’s dive in. So Ford, Dan, Esam, welcome to The Six Five.
Ford Tamer: Thank you.
Esam Elashmawi: Good to be here, good to see you guys.
Patrick Moorhead: Congratulations on the big announcements.
Esam Elashmawi: Thank you.
Daniel Newman: Really funny by the way, you say Pat, made FPGAs cool. It was only like two years ago that chips weren’t cool at all.
Patrick Moorhead: Oh, that’s right.
Daniel Newman: We are so back.
Patrick Moorhead: I know.
Daniel Newman: We are so back.
Patrick Moorhead: That changed quick.
Daniel Newman: It has been a great couple of years and look, sometimes it takes that massive secular tailwind to get everybody realigned, but heck being hardware guys, being into hardware and chips, it’s cool again. Speaking of cool, Ford, great job on stage, new to the role, what are you, 90 days?
Ford Tamer: Almost.
Daniel Newman: Almost 90 days. So give us the so far experience here at Lattice Semiconductor. Tell us a little bit about how it’s going.
Ford Tamer: Look, I’m amped up. It’s been a whirlwind and traveled to employees and customers around the world and I’m blown away by the talent of our developer community. As you’ve seen in the room, and you’ll see around the show floor on all the demos, we’ve got a fantastic offering and as you said, FPGAs seem to be everywhere. They’re special and demand is growing fast and Lattice with our mid-range and small FPGA families are growing even faster than the market and the FPGA industry. And we are providing an opportunity for our developer to provide fantastic applications to our 11,000 customers worldwide and growing. So a very exciting time to be in the FPGA market at Lattice with our developer community today.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s been great to get to know you, Ford.
Ford Tamer: Thank you.
Patrick Moorhead: You’re spending time with analysts, which we appreciate. We’re the educators of the broader outside market and it’s great to get to know you and I have been struck, I spent a little time on social media and I do catch all of the different hops you had as you were visiting all of your different facilities. So it was really good to see. So from a strategic standpoint, can you talk about what the strategy is and what are the resources and differentiated assets that you’re bringing to the table to execute on that?
Ford Tamer: Yeah. So look, we are very focused on the small to mid-range markets. We’re not going after large. We’re very focused on where we do well, not just with silicon, but with soft IP tools. What we’re calling now workloads for AI and solutions and very intent on providing differentiation to be number one with low power. And we’re talking milli watts. We’re a small size with ease of use tools, soft IP solutions and differentiated solution for Edge AI and security and providing to our developer community what we call the three S’s: solutions, support and supply on top of that.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it’s great to see. Dan and I sometimes, hyperscalers will let us open up the hood. I remember we were at an Amazon facility and we were at an Azure facility and they let us come in and we see your logo on that GPU server and it’s pretty cool. I know a lot of people think of you as the Edge AI company, which you are, but the fact that you show up in some of this important infrastructure, it is pretty fun to see. It’s like, hey, I know these people.
Esam Elashmawi: We’ve got the largest install base of any other FPGA company that’s out there today and small FPGAs are being proliferated across all of our end markets, compute, servers, industrial automotive consumer as well.
Ford Tamer: Yeah, I was very impressed with the variety of application when I visited the customer base, 250 million unit chips a year. Anywhere from robotic, industrial automation, communication, computing, aerospace, defense, consumers, we are really the Swiss army knife of the industry.
Patrick Moorhead: I love it.
Ford Tamer: And it’s funny because I mentioned this, I came up with this on my own and Esam told me they ran an ad a few years ago with the Swiss army knife.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s been really impressive to watch. And I think the ability too to rotate through what I would say this massive change that’s happened and you’ve been able to grow through it. Parts of your traditional market segments have seen declines and other parts are seeing extraordinary growth. And so as Pat and I are unwrapping some of these cloud products or some of these PCs and all these places where you are seeing a lot of enthusiasm and growth, it’s great to see Lattice inside. Esam, this is always a product moment for the company. You made several new product announcements here today. Can you share a little bit with us on those announcements?
Esam Elashmawi: Yeah, absolutely. Today was another proof point of Lattice’s commitment to the FPGA market, specifically around small and mid-range FPGAs. In the mid-range market, we launched Avant and we’ve had three device families for Avant that we previously announced are Edge optimize Avant-E, all the way to our advanced connectivity Avant-X. And what we launched today with an expansion of that portfolio, we added the Avant 30 and 50, which gave our customers more capacity options as well as package options, which further optimize their selection capabilities for the control and data path in Edge AI and security type application. And the customers asked us, “Hey, we need more, give us some more device options.” So we executed and launched that today.
And then we also launched our next generation small FPGA platform, which we’re really excited about and Dan took the lead on that. And that’s really our nexus too. So it’s our next generation small FPGA also built on cut some of the DNA of Lattice, which is a low power, a small form factor, not sacrificing performance at all. And then as you touched on earlier, it’s not just the hardware that matters, it’s also the software. So we also launched today updates to our design tool environment, our Radiant, our embedded software suite around processor designs, Propel. We have more announcements around that, more features, ease of use, more capabilities, but also we’ve done some upgrades on our software solution stacks and we’ve added more capabilities, pre-built applications to make it easier for our customers to design in with Lattice. So today was a really good day as far as announcements.
Patrick Moorhead: They really were and I think when we first did this or I think when we first met, it was pretty much one product line with minimal software tooling around that. And you’ve really grown, it’s great to see. So I’m kind of a history buff when it comes to technology. Dan just says because I’m old that I do this, but there’s a lot of stuff you can learn from history. And one thing that probably over the last 40 years that’s been very consistent, that given time, the compute will get closest to the place of data creation and it just takes time. And this is going to be true for Edge and this is true for AI given enough time because of latency, because of cost, privacy, all these good reasons that AI, and this is a question for you, Ford, what is unique about Lattice and its offering for the Edge AI market? Because there’s a lot of choices out there.
Ford Tamer: Yeah, no, very good question. First make sure we position this correctly. Our goal is to be a good partner and a good companionship to the NVIDIAs, to the AWS, to all the various partners out there. So our goal is not to encroach on any of them. Our goal is to complement their offering and we’re going to complement it by being near a sensor. So where you’ve heard from Dell today where the keynote described this contextual AI where there is tremendous benefit being near a sensor because you lower latency in milliseconds and with this small Nexus device that we showed today, less than one centimeter square, very low power in milliwatts and being able to run, these are not the cloud type of models, these are the Tiny AI actually. You go do a search and Tiny AI right now is the rage. We’re running things like Tiny YOLO or Tiny MobileNet or Tiny ResNet in our FPGA that’s already on the board anyhow. We’re in there doing bridging or IO expansion or security and we’ve got a few gates that are available to run these Tiny AI models. And so why not add more intelligence near a sensor that enhances your system experience?
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it seems like a really substantial opportunity. And I know there’s, to your point about history and compute moving closer, and I know we actually always talk about the accordion, Things go back to the data center, back to the edge, back to the data center. I think AI is going to be a bit of a forcing function. You’re going to have to bring a lot of compute close to the data. You’re not going to scale. We will have obviously these really powerful data centers of course, but we have to get smarter at the edge and build these small semiconductors that can do a lot of the right types of processing. Dan, thanks for your patience. Welcome to the show. Good morning.
Patrick Moorhead: Dan’s here.
Daniel Newman: Good morning. Hey Dan. Great name by the way. So talk a little bit about the small FPGA size. So we just went to the edge. I know we want to talk about the small, we know there’s been a lot of ascent, a lot of TAM expansion has gone, but Nexus has really been a core product and I think it’s like your baby. Tell us a little bit about what’s going on there with Nexus and Nexus 2?
Dan Mansur: So first of all, I love the small FPGAs. It’s something that’s the heart of Lattice and we ship a quarter billion units or 250 million units per year on average. And with that we really have a great installed base with Nexus. Nexus is used by lots of customers and we have up to 50 devices to choose from. And what I really like is you get a lot of customer feedback with that. And with that customer feedback, we’ve really been able to come up with Nexus 2. There’s really kind of three areas we’ve innovated on.
First one is advanced connectivity. So we got to connect to those latest sensors. So it’s the latest might be DeFi at eight gig we have to get connect to multiple sensors. And then when you get that back, you have to send it to DRAMs. We’ve upgraded the bandwidth to memory, we’ve upgraded the back-haul, and with all those upgrades we’ve had to rebalance the power performance. And so we’ve optimized this architecture really for low power. Then lastly, really on Nexus 2, we’ve really been able to improve the security. Most customers I go to security is now the dominant question. They expect low power, but now with security at the edge, I see more and more people looking for us to be part of that fortress all the way to the edge with security.
Patrick Moorhead: I’ve always been, again, I said you guys were the first company that made FPGAs cool and I’m serious about that. But one of the things you did when I first started researching you, a lot of the competitors in your space were, I want to say milking designs, but they were leveraging designs that were five, six, maybe seven years old on older processes. And then you came in and said, “Hey, no, no, we’ve got a new design in a better process for lower power.” And it looks like you’re doing this here with Nexus II. I think that’s pretty cool. So Esam, in the opening, we talked about new products, we also talked about partners and customers, Ford, I think you had talked about Dell on Edge AI here, but Esam, let me hit you up. Give me the highlights of customer announcements and partner announcements here.
Esam Elashmawi: We recognized early on that as an FPGA supplier, for us to be successful, meaning the industry to be successful, it’s not just about Lattice, it’s about developing an ecosystem around FPGAs. And if you look at our ecosystem around Lattice, it’s grown by 6X since we started this journey. That’s significant. So we have more than ever more companies out there building soft IP that’s compatible with Lattice FPGAs. So our customers not only can select from a library of IPs from Lattice, but now there are more companies out there building IPs that are compatible with Lattice as well. And then we’ve also got more partner companies. We’ve talked about NVIDIA, we talk about others that are now building reference designs that are leveraging Lattice as well. So that’s proliferating Lattice across many applications as well.
And then if you look at the number of design houses out there that can help our customers get to market, build system, build boards, there are more and more trained on Lattice as well. So the ecosystem is growing and I think we’ve reached an inflection point as well that they’re just not supporting Lattice. They’re really contributing now to the effectiveness of Lattice parts. They’re contributing either in workloads around AI, they’re contributing in motor control algorithm, ISP algorithms. And what that does, and this is what this conference is about, it’s about getting the ecosystem together with FPGA developers and let’s look at the best tips and tricks and best practice and who’s doing what. I didn’t know I can get this a application in an FPGA that I already have. I didn’t know that while my FPGA is there, I can actually do monitoring of firmware and do security. And so this developer’s conference is really about everybody seeing what others are doing to get the most out of your FPGA application. And the ecosystem is a big part of that. And I know our partners, I meet with them on a regular basis. They appreciate this because this developer’s conference is a proof point of Lattice’s investment in the ecosystem as well.
Patrick Moorhead: I love it.
Daniel Newman: And speaking of proof points though, Esam, you had some pretty big numbers like year-on-year, right? A lot more customers, a lot more demos.
Esam Elashmawi: Yeah, look, we had a thousand more registrants this year compared to last year. We’ve exceeded 6,000 registrants, people that are with us live, also virtual. That’s an indication that the adoption of FPGAs is going up and the ecosystem around Lattice FPGAs is increasing.
Patrick Moorhead: I think they might need a bigger boat, Dan.
Daniel Newman: Bigger boat, a bigger venue, bigger stage. Strap in everyone. But Ford, let’s wrap this up with you. You’ve got a great audience of developers that spent time with you today. You’ve got world-class customers. I think sometimes maybe the market doesn’t fully appreciate the NVIDIAs. I know last year you had Metas and some of these big, big companies that are building with Lattice. Any thoughts, messages that you want to share? Final thoughts for that group?
Ford Tamer: Yeah, I think what’s in it for our developers is we got 55,000 developers worldwide using our software. What’s in it for them? Based on IHS and our own data, Lattice is going to grow much faster than both the FPGA market and the semiconductor market, allowing our developers to really deliver benefits to our customers and grow their business. Our success depends on their success. So our philosophy is one of staying very close to these customers. I give my business cards with my cell phone on it. Surprisingly, people don’t call me that often because we focus on quality, we focus on innovation, but I offer it and all the way to the top, we are very concerned and focused on our developer success in the market and then their success is our success.
Daniel Newman: Well, Ford, Esam, Dan, congratulations. Good stuff. It was really fun, I know Pat and I both really enjoyed it. Hardware is so back and this is a great event. Congratulations on all the growth. Let’s see you at the Developer Conference 2025.
Esam Elashmawi: Sounds good.
Daniel Newman: Blink and we’ll be there, right? Thanks. All right, and thank you everybody so much for attending and being part of this great conversation. Hit that subscribe button, be part of The Six Five community. We appreciate you very much. And check out all the other videos we did here. We did some demos, you’ll need to click on to that as well. But for this show, for this sit down and great conversation with the leadership at Lattice Semiconductor, we got to say goodbye. We’ll see you all later.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
