Lattice Semiconductor
More info
- Founded
- Headquarters
- Hillsboro, Oregon
- Type
- Fabless semiconductor company (FPGA)
- Website
- latticesemi.com
The third FPGA maker, carved into the small low-power niche — and, unexpectedly, a favourite of the open-source crowd.
Founded in 1983 in Hillsboro, Oregon. While Xilinx and Altera fought over the big, expensive parts, Lattice went for the small and frugal: iCE40 (from its 2011 purchase of SiliconBlue), MachXO and ECP5. The iCE40 in particular became the de facto platform for a free toolchain — Project IceStorm, yosys and nextpnr — because its bitstream format could be documented from the outside.
Cheap parts and openly reverse-engineered formats won Lattice a loyal following in the maker and research worlds that the larger vendors never earned.