Lattice Semiconductor's stars are shining brightly

I had a strange Matrix-esque sense of "disconnected reality" a couple of days ago. I'd just received a press release from Brian Kiernan, who is the Corporate Communications Manager at Lattice Semiconductor.

While perusing and pondering this release, which described – in loving detail – Lattice's latest and greatest MachXO2 control systems development kit (Click Here to see that article), my orbs suddenly opened wide when I read the following quote:

"Customers are utilizing the MachXO2 family to address the increasing number of system interfaces and leveraging low cost, low power programmability to implement smart system control," said Brent Przybus, Lattice Senior Director of Corporate and Product Marketing. "The Control Development Kit simplifies prototyping of these systems and demonstrates its use in a wide range of system control applications in the most demanding markets."

"What? Brent Przybus? But surely Brent is firmly ensconced at Xilinx," I thought to myself. Seriously – I was taken aback. So much so, in fact, that I immediately called Brian to make sure that there was no mistake, and what Brian told me made the hairs on the back of my neck stand quivering to attention in astonishment…

It seems that Lattice has been attracting some major talent in recent months. For example, Mustafa Veziroglu, Brent Przybus, Harry Raftopoulos, and Suresh Menon have all moved to Lattice from Xilinx.


In their new roles at Lattice, Mustafa is Corporate Vice President, Marketing and Business Development; Brent is Senior Director, Product and Corporate Marketing; Harry is Senior Director, Vertical Marketing; and Suresh has joined the Lattice R&D Staff as VP of Systems Development.

"Good Golly Miss Molly," I thought (or words to that effect). Actually, I must admit to being a tad puzzled. Why would four guys of this level of seniority and accomplishment leave a mega-successful programmable device behemoth like Xilinx and move to a – it has to be said – much smaller company like Lattice?

This is not to slight Lattice in any way, you understand. I think they have a bunch of really interesting programmable device technologies, including some unique offerings like their mixed-signal programmable power and platform management families; also their ICE40 ultra-low-density and ultra-low-power FPGAs that came from their acquisition of SiliconBlue.

But still and all, it has to be admitted that Lattice is a much smaller player than Xilinx when it comes to Programmable Space (where no one can hear you scream).

Fortunately, Brian was able to set up a conference call between Mustafa, Brent, Harry, and myself (Suresh was having too much fun doing cool engineering stuff).

I don’t want to go into all of the nitty-gritty details here. Suffice it to say that the overall takeaway from our conversation was that their move was not prompted by anything lacking at Xilinx ("It's not what wasn't there," as one of them said, in a fine display of nested negatives), but rather the fact that they see Lattice as being poised for tremendous success, and they firmly believe that they can be major contributors to that success.

Their feeling is that Lattice could be on the brink of something huge – not competing with "the big boys" in markets like communications infrastructure that demands the biggest, baddest, hairiest programmable devices – but instead using their unique technologies to calve out and dominate new markets – taking programmable devices into places they have not been seen before (be afraid, be very afraid :-)

Well, I for one am tremendously enthused by all of this. I think the next few years are going to be very interesting indeed, and I wish great success to "The good ship Lattice and all who sail in her!"

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