Frontier

More of The Best Third Party IP

I spend around half of my time thinking and working on Intellectual Property (IP) related items.  A big portion of that time is spent working with third party IP partners.   I see these as important as they extend the range of IP available for our devices beyond what we choose to develop internally.

This morning we announced our most recent 3rd party IP partner WDC and their 65xx microprocessor core.  WDC joins other recent additions to the ispLeverCORE Connection program such as IntelliProp and their line up of ATA cores, Mercury Computing with their industry leading Serial RapidIO products, Art of Silicon who provides image processing expertise and Elliptic who provides a range of AES and DES products.

By extending the portfolio of IP beyond our ispLeverCORE program these partners represent Lattice's "More of The Best" philosophy. "More" means more variety. "The Best" means best in class. With our IP partners, Lattice brings you more variety of best in class IP: "More of The Best."

So, if you haven't checked out Lattice IP over the last year I encourage you to click on one of the links above.  Hopefully you will find  something that will let you get your next design to market quicker and with less risk.

Dare to Be Different

It's no secret that Lattice is a relatively new entrant to the FPGA market.  Of course, over time we aspire to increase our standing.  To do that I believe we need to do things differently from the big two incumbents.

Back in December of last year, six months into our LatticeMico8 experience, we grappled with a decision about our 32-bit soft micro controller.  Should that, like the LatticeMico8, be open source?   Having led the decision process I can tell you there was a good amount of discussion and a variety of views.  However, ultimately our desire to do things differently to benefit customers ultimately won out.  You can see the result in our new LatticeMico32 announcement.

The summer of 2005 was also the time of much discussion at Lattice.  Then we were defining the appropriate feature set for our LatticeECP2M product.  As the first Low-cost FPGA with embedded 3.125Gbps SERDES and high memory count, again I think we came up with something a little different.

For the last couple of weeks I have been visiting editors to brief them on the LatticeECP2M and LatticeMico32.  On the last leg of my trip, I had the chance to visit an ancient temple.  I made a small offering and prayed for the success of our two new products. I don't think they need it but every little helps. Dare to be different.....

Open Source II

It is late Wednesday afternoon here in Silicon Valley and I should really be developing a new set of materials detailing our current and future products.  However, we had a great set of comments on my previous Open Source post and I thought it appropriate to take a few minutes to respond.

AS Assembler Support A couple of folks noted that the LatticeMico8 is supported by Alfred Arnold's AS Assembler.  I took some time yesterday to look around the AS Assembler site and learned a couple of things:

• Arnold has a great collection of computers.  You can check out the photos on Alfred's personal page.
• The AS Assembler looks like a decent tool and supports the LatticeMico8.

Based on this "extensive" research we went ahead and provided a link to the AS assembler on the LatticeMico8 page.  (That loud noise you can hear is the corporate machinery moving at faster than normal speed.)

Coding Style Some good feedback on coding style and the need for more commenting.  I have already shared this with the key developers.  Over time, we may be able to make some improvements here.  However, pragmatically I expect that the coding will continue to be somewhat Lattice oriented :-)

Development Teams Mood Regarding Open Source There were also some comments on our motivations/thoughts/feelings regarding open source.  As the Lattice team discussed releasing LatticeMico8 as open source, we clearly had in our minds that Lattice is somewhat smaller than our FPGA competitors and that open source would provide us with an opportunity to do something different.  In a way, this development (and hopefully others that follow) is making the FPGA space more "democratic"  with more choices.  This matches what we are doing with the silicon.  All this got me and many of my Lattice colleagues excited.

Lastly if anyone has any LatticeMico8 applications that they would like to share, then let me know.

Open Source

One Sunday morning during July 2005, I sat at my kitchen table drafting the Lattice Open IP Cores license agreement while my young daughter attempted to sit on my head.  Was it worth the effort?  As to being a human jungle gym, definitely.  With regards to Open Source IP for FPGAs, the jury is still out....   Shortly after crafting the license agreement, we released the LatticeMico8 microcontroller as open source.  I have heard of many examples of customers using this LatticeMico8, which is great.  However, I have not heard much feedback on the Open Source nature of this IP.  I would be interested in reading comments from users on this topic.  Does it make sense to have Open Source IPs for FPGAs?  Should Lattice be doing more of this? 

Connections

Earlier this week I visited the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Francisco. This got me thinking, why do we as a technology industry collectively spend millions of dollars on trade shows? The answer is connections.  These events, despite all the corporate glitz, help folks interact with potential suppliers and/or customers (depending on your perspective) and understand who they are doing business with.  That is what this blog is intended to be, an opportunity for Lattice and its customers to interact on a more human level.

Who is Gordon Hands?

A quick background on myself. My involvement in programmable logic started in 1995 when I joined the programmable logic division of AMD. After a couple of years this division was separated out as Vantis that was then acquired by Lattice.  During the last 11 years I have had the opportunity to help define and launch our successful MACH 4/A and MACH 4000 CPLD products along with many of the products in our Look-up Table (LUT) based line up, including the LatticeECP/ECP2/XP and MachXO products.  Currently, I am Strategic Marketing Director here at Lattice and continue to be involved in the definition and launch of silicon products along with spending a significant part of my time shaping our increasingly important Intellectual Property (IP) business.

Almost Nothing Turns Out As Expected

Few things in life turn out quite as you expect! This applies to career, love, family and also PLDs. As we plan and introduce new PLDs we spend a lot a time thinking about the applications in which designers will use them. Some applications turn out to be realistic, some fall by the wayside and of course our customers discover many more. I hope that this blog will be good forum to discuss how designers are using programmable logic, what is working and what is not.

Onto improved connections ........