Courtesy: Lattice Semiconductor

With the explosion of data being generated by billions of connected devices, sensors, and systems, major technology inflection points like AI at the Edge, sensor to cloud connectivity, and resilient security are creating new opportunities. With these trends, the demand for FPGAs is significantly growing thanks to their inherent programmability as customers and developers look for more flexible and adaptable solutions. FPGAs help to improve the longevity of product lifecycles and accelerate time-to-market, enabling customers and developers to lean into FPGA technology when designing applications across Communications, Computing, Industrial, Automotive, and Consumer markets. We are also seeing a fast-growing FPGA ecosystem with an estimated 100,000+ new FPGA-based designs starting every year and 50,000+ FPGA developers worldwide.

With more than 40-years of low power programmable solution innovation, Lattice introduced the ground-breaking mid-range FPGA platform, Lattice Avant and Lattice Avant-E device family in 2022, extending our low power leadership to span the small and mid-size density FPGA portions of the market. This introduction was born out of customer demand as they found the market lacking compelling mid-range FPGA solutions, with three key considerations: power efficiency, performance, and form factor, design aspects for which Lattice has become known and trusted for over the last 4 decades.

Today, at the Lattice Developers Conference, Lattice announced multiple innovative hardware and software solutions creating the strongest and fastest product portfolio in company’s history by introducing two new mid-range FPGAs – Lattice Avant-G and Lattice Avant-X, expanded solution stacks for AI, embedded vision, security, and factory automation, and enhanced software capabilities supporting the robust product portfolio.

Higher Performance. Lower Power – New Mid-range FPGAs

Lattice Avant-G FPGA Family

Avant-G general purpose FPGAs are designed to enable a wide range customer needs by offering seamless, flexible interface bridging and optimized compute for system expandability.

Lattice Avant-G devices offer best-in-class signal processing and AI, flexible I/O supporting a range of system interfaces, while providing dedicated LPDDR4 memory interfaces at 2400 Mbps. Lattice Avant-G devices deliver 12.5G SERDES with support for up to PCIe Gen 3 and 10G Ethernet.

Lattice Avant-X FPGA Family

Avant-X advanced connectivity FPGAs are designed to enable high bandwidth and security, with a feature set tailored to customer needs for signal aggregation and high throughput.

Lattice Avant-X devices offer up to 1 Terabit per second total system bandwidth, PCIe Gen 4 controllers with hard DMA, and a security engine to encrypt user data in motion providing quantum safe cryptography. Lattice Avant-X devices deliver 25G SERDES supporting up to PCIe Gen 4 and 25G Ethernet, along with support for DDR5 memories and advanced user-logic accessible security.

Key features and performance highlights of the new Lattice Avant-G and Avant-X FPGAs include:

• Power Efficiency

• • Up to 2.5X lower power than similar class competitive devices, helping system and application engineers achieve power and thermal design efficiencies, improve operating costs, and enhance reliability
• Form Factor
  • Up to 6X smaller package size compared to similar class competitive devices enables size-efficient system designs
• Performance:
  • Up to 8X faster INT8 multipliers compared to similar class competitive devices, optimized for AI/ML applications
  • Up to 10X faster device configuration times for applications requiring rapid start-up
• Modernized Feature set (varies by device):
  • Advanced bitstream and user logic accessible security features including AES encryption, ECC/RSA authentication, quantum safe cryptography, physical unclonable functions (PUF), tamper monitor, true random number generator (TRNG), and side-channel resistance
  • High speed memory interface support including LPDDR4 and DDR5, and Hardened DFI training layer
  • Fastest Soft Error Detect (SED) to minimize error propagation and to enable fastest recovery from Single Event Upset (SEU)

Expanded Solution Stacks – Accelerating Your Time to Market

Lattice’s solution stacks are designed to speed customer development and time-to-market by giving them a toolkit of hardware, software, and IP tailored to the needs of their application. Solution stack updates announced today include:

Lattice sensAI solution stack: Accelerates the integration of flexible, low power inferencing at the Edge for AI applications across client computing, automotive, factory automation, and consumer IoT with:

• Up to 3X faster performance with upgraded accelerator engine and complier tool
• Expanded network support with additional preprocessing capabilities

Lattice mVision solution stack: Accelerates the development of low power embedded vision applications including machine vision, robotics, ADAS, drones, and AR/VR with:

• Expanded sensor/video bridging solutions including MIPI to PCIe®, SLVS-EC to PCIe, and MIPI to HDMI reference designs and demos

Lattice Sentry solution stack: Provides a cyber resilient Root of Trust solution with:

• Platform Firmware Resiliency (PFR) root of trust to secure and develop a NIST 800-193 compliant PFR solution

Lattice Automate solution stack: Accelerates the development of smart Industrial automation systems including applications like robotics, embedded real time networking, predictive maintenance, functional safety, and security with:

• Enablement of Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) for field communication
• Expanded motor control solutions with golden hardware & golden system reference designs

Enhanced Software Capabilities

Lattice is committed to providing best-in-class, easy-to-use software tools that help enhance customers’ design experience and design environment. Key updates to Lattice Propel and Lattice Radiant software includes adding full support for the new Lattice Avant-G and Avant-X FPGA families, the introduction of enhanced ease-of-use and scripting to Radiant, and expanding the IP portfolio in Propel.

Advanced computer vision software Glance by Mirametrix was also updated with new features to expand its applicability across Edge applications for various markets. Updates include a new smart avatar privacy feature and 3D head pose for low power capability.

Latest FPGA Trends and Opportunities in Today’s Interconnected World

Alongside these exciting new hardware and software solutions announcement, Lattice is hosting a 3-day virtual Developers Conference featuring

• Guest keynotes from NVIDIA, Meta, and BMW
• An incredible line up of guest panel discussions on Edge AI, connectivity, and security
• 35+ in-depth technical breakout sessions and trainings
• A robust FPGA-based demo showcase with industry leading partners and customers