Accelerating Intelligence at the Edge

What is Lattice Semiconductor’s strategy for driving AI innovation? 🤔 

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At the Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed 2025, host Daniel Newman, CEO at the Futurum Group, is joined by Esam Elashmawi, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Lattice Semiconductor, to explore the evolving landscape of AI applications, from the data center to the edge. Discover how Lattice Semiconductor is driving innovation in silicon and software to meet the demands for more flexible and power-efficient computing across various markets.

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Key takeaways include:

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🔹Lattice's Role in the AI Landscape: Explore how Lattice is making significant contributions across the entire AI spectrum, from powering intensive data center operations to enabling intelligent applications at the very edge.

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🔹Adapting to Market Demands with FPGAs: Learn how Lattice's Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and other innovative solutions are continuously evolving to meet the dynamic needs of the market. Plus, gain insights into what attributes customers value most when choosing FPGAs for their most critical projects.

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🔹The Road Ahead: Next-Gen Innovations: Glimpse into the future direction of Lattice Semiconductor, as Esam Elashmawi reveals their strategies for next-generation innovations and how they plan to cater to the burgeoning trends in the Communications, Computing, Industrial, and Automotive sectors.

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🔹Powering the Edge and Beyond: Understand the critical importance of flexible and power-efficient computing in today's AI-driven world, and how Lattice is striving to deliver these essential capabilities.

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Learn more at Lattice Semiconductor. Watch the video below at Six Five Media, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.

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Or listen to the audio here:

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Daniel Newman: Esam, so great to have you back for this year's Six Five Summit. This has become a bit of an annual thing for you and I.

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Esam: Yeah I love this.

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Daniel Newman: I genuinely love these conversations. I'm talking to you. So let's jump in because you know the audience here, I mean, there's so much happening here at the summit. You know, Lattice is a company that of course has really grown its presence over the years. Known for being a leader in FPGAs but is also becoming a leader in AI. I mean, you're doing many things in AI. You're involved in data center, edge AI. Just give, give everybody out there a bit of the background of what you are focusing on across the AI space right now.

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Esam Elashmawi: Yeah, good question. Like you said, there's a variety of places that we play when it comes to AI. When you look at our AI related revenue, it falls into, let's say three buckets. The first bucket being we enable a lot of the AI specific servers that are in the data center. So when you think about the AI racks that are there, we play a critical role in control management and also security type applications. If you take a rack for example, you're going to find a number of Lattice FPGA devices there. And it's not just enabling the AI specific servers, but we're also in the routers and switch cards, NIC cards, et cetera. So we enable a lot of what's happening in the data center with Lattice FPGAs. Now the other bucket of AI stuff that we work on is to think about all the stuff that's happening in the automotive market or industrial market. I think it was Mazda actually that released a press release about how Lattice is enabling their ADAS systems. And what we're doing is we're taking all these sensors that are being deployed across the world. Just more and more sensors being deployed. And the problem statement is that the typical compute accelerator wasn't designed to take in all these different types of sensors. There's so many. It could be an image sensor, gyro, it could be a pressure sensor, temperature. What we do really well is we take that sensor into our FPGA and then we aggregate it. We do like sensor fusion and then we pre-process it and then we do some of the secret sauce that's needed to go to the GPU. For example, we've got a partnership, a formal partnership with Nvidia that we can take that Sensor data. And some of that secret sauce we do is CUDA secret sauce. And then we send it into an Nvidia compute gpu and then we can run the AI on the edge. So we do a lot of that, not just in automotive, but in industrial equipment, as you can imagine as well. So we're in the data path of an AI application. Now the third bucket is, hey, why not do the actual AI on a lattice FPGA? And there are numerous applications today that are actually putting the inferencing on the FPGA and that has value as well. FPGAs are reprogrammable. You put your secret sauce models, change, update your models, update your use cases. So where do you find those types of things? Well, if you look at a client device, we talked last year about how Dell is ramping up with XPS models and latitude models, and the lattice FPGA is right by the camera there doing a lot of the AI use cases in the client device. We're also in factories, we do sorting, so object detection for defects. We're in smart control panels and factories that recognize the operator coming, approaching it, but also making sure he's hitting the right button, that he's not looking somewhere else and hitting buttons randomly. So there's lots of applications where you can actually put the inferencing on the FPGA. And the beauty, again, reprogrammable. Update your models, your secret sauce. But very small, very low power.

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Daniel Newman: Yeah, I think it's really important to double click there because people might interpret that as you saying, hey, we are an accelerator or a GPU and really your complement. Right. In so many cases where some it might be, hey, you've got this one or two specific tasks that we can just do better, more efficiently than, you know, and then again, kind of feeding, you know, it's never bad to announce or discuss partnerships that you have with Nvidia. It seems to be a very popular thing these days. But that you have. And by the way, I remember for a few years now, because I've come to your big annual DevCon and you've been showing this stuff off when, you know, sensing technologies related to adas, because you kind of said, oh, we're helping adas. People go, oh, you're doing ADAS. Well, we're helping with ADAS to enable it.

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Esam Elashmawi: That's right.

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Daniel Newman: Yeah, you're an enabler for it and without what you do. And I also, I've seen over the years, you know, for anyone out there who's not really super familiar but like everything that's sort of sensing, you know, a lot of people. I don't know if you've noticed, but I know I'm on a new laptop here. That's why it looks so great. I won't say whose laptop, but like, you know, you walk up to a laptop and you don't touch it and you just get in front of it and it pops up, powers on and does facial recognition and loads on. I think there's technology from a company maybe like yours that actually helps with that. Or when I'm sitting here working and maybe someone walks up behind me, shoulder surfing.

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Esam Elashmawi: Shoulder surfing.  It's called shoulder surfing, by the way.

Daniel Newman: A very high vulnerability. You know, a lot of people think every hack is really crazy engineering. A lot of it is just users, users being lax in their behaviors. You know, I say it's the stickers you leave on your laptop. It's also just literally having something like a password sitting up on your screen or someone watching you log in and then making a note. And you guys have built a lot of technology for that. So you're really also always complimenting, enabling and thinking about things. And that's both AI, but also the power of a specialty FPGA that can sit inside low cost, low power, that can handle a workload like that without putting extra cycles on the, you know, the SOC that's being used for traditional and core applications.

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Esam Elashmawi: And you bring up a really good point. When people think about taking AI on the edge, you really have to understand what is that AI application you want to do on the edge. Are you really after the fastest performance, which comes at a very high cost of power, or this application doesn't require that hybrid, doesn't require a GPU. If it doesn't require a GPU, why pay the money for a GPU? Why take the space of a GPU? Why consume all the power of that gpu, especially for handheld devices or battery operated devices? So there is a spectrum of applications, some that, yes, may need the highest power and performance, but the vast majority that we see working with our customers don't require that GPU type performance. In fact, if you think about the architectures of some of these GPUs, they were mainly architected for more machine learning than they were for inferencing. So if you really want to do inferencing and you want to do it efficiently at a much lower cost, which, a much better value proposition, which is size and power and cost, then adopt a piece of silicon that's really tuned for inferencing. And that's where our FPGA’s on the edge have a really good value proposition.

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Daniel Newman: Yeah, I love that. And I also, I've always been a big fan of some of the security applications you focus on, you know, things obviously where vulnerabilities are high like in boot, you know, when you know that stuff that FPGAs have been used for. Lattice specifically. Another great example you've shown at your developer events, you know that I think have been very successful and I think this really all speaks to the company and its agility, its ability to sort of adapt. When I first got to know you, it was very much kind of in the low end. You know, since you've been there under your leadership and the leadership of Lattice, you've definitely come up in the market, you've seen a gap in sort of the mid market. You know, talk a little bit about how customers partners and is sort of driving this agile approach and sort of been shaping your strategy because the strategy has evolved pretty quickly in your space.

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Esam Elashmawi: Yeah, I want to give credit also to the entire organization. We've got a lot of talented folks within Lattice that are really leading us into this new era of adapting programmability into multiple types of application. I think one of the good things about what we do is like you said, we're very focused. If you look at the FPGA market, there's small, mid sized and large and we're really focused on small and mid range FPGAs. And that's where we believe the core mainstream of FPGA usages in our industry and in the markets. The other beauty of an FPGA is because it's programmable, it's actually a horizontal solution. Like you hear us talking about, hey, we're solving stuff in compute, we're solving stuff in communications, we're solving stuff in industrial, aerospace and defense, automotive, even in consumer FPGAs can actually do multitude of functions and that goes across multiple end markets. And so whether it be bridging, interfacing, motor control, AI security, like you said, vision type applications, what it allows us to do, which I think is unique to Lattice, is see what's happening across the industry, across all of these end markets. So we get good telemetry on, hey, what are these emerging trends that are coming out? Somebody's want to do something that's new, an emerging trend and they don't have the right solution, will use an FPGA. And so working with our customers and working with the system architects, whether it be in compute or comms or industrial, automotive, etc. We get really good telemetry of what their challenges are, what they are trying to do, what the emerging trends are. And then we build roadmaps and software solutions that help our customers solve those, those emerging trends and the applications that they're trying to address for the future, products that they're building. And then we tie that into our roadmap and the team does a great job on executing.

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Daniel Newman: Yeah, I've been witness to that. I've seen the expansion. How much is the developer ecosystem expanded with your software? I mean, this was probably one of the best indicators in any case, especially when you're kind of trying to make that just being a raw hardware company to kind of a hardware software developer stack. And I remember, like I said from the first developer conference I went to, to like the third or fourth. Have you done three or four?

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Esam Elashmawi: We've done three now.

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Daniel Newman: Okay. The third. Yeah, I mean it was like the first one. I mean, you know, this is a compliment. It was like a small number, but it was like a change of guard. By the third one it was like, oh my gosh, you've got some of the biggest companies, biggest partners showing up here because they're really seeing the value. I mean, I imagine the developer ecosystem growth has been a pretty strong indicator of everything you just talked about, but also as a strong indicator of how much this platform has room for growth.

Esam Elashmawi: Yeah, at our last developers conference, we had a record over 6,000 registrants. And if you look at our developers ecosystem since we started this, it's grown by 6x and it continues to grow as well. More and more companies and developers are adopting and building solutions for Lattice FPGAs. And you saw that as well. That ecosystem of developers are not just people building soft IPs that can be programmed to our FPGAs, but it's also other semiconductor companies, like the partnerships we talked about with Nvidia and others, where they're building reference designs and solutions now leveraging lattice FPGAs as well. And then if you need a design house to help you build your system, well, they're trained on Lattice devices as well. So that ecosystem has grown tremendously. And that's something that we're going to actually continue to invest in. Because as we go into these new emerging trends around vision, around AI and security, we're finding more and more people needing assistance because these are complex things. These are emerging, people are learning. And so we're investing more in our ecosystem to help our customers get these new applications into the market as well.

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Daniel Newman: Well, Esam, we've got just a couple minutes left here. We'd love to sort of hear where you see this going next. How much does AI continue to shift your business? Give us a little taste of what we can expect.

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Esam Elashmawi: Well, I tell you what, what I tell my employees and colleagues here is I truly believe the best of times are to come. When you look at what's happening in our industry, what we're doing in Lattice, around Security, around AI, around Vision, our new products that we're introducing, all the solutions that we're bringing to market with our software solution stacks, what we're enabling. I think the most exciting times are to come and we're going to continue to work closely with our customers, with our ecosystem partners and, and continue to make a difference in our industry.

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Daniel Newman: Well, Esam, you know, every time we connect I become a little bit more enlightened in what you're doing and I continue to see, you know, you literally connect the dots across so many different areas. It's been great to watch the success. It's been a, you know, an interesting couple of years, the market as a whole and you know, with, you know, I like that you kind of gave a shout to all the team. Of course it's been good to get to know Ford Tamer, your new CEO. It looks like the market's sort of finding shape. AI has sort of been an accelerator. I think we're also going to start to see some of those markets that were slower coming back and I think even just the last quarter that we talked, some of the results were starting to show that Semis is back beyond just the AI chips. Like there is actually a lot going on and you know, everything in FPGAs. You continue to be one of the companies, it's one of the only actually at this point that's really focused entirely on this particular space and I expect to continue to see good results. Esam, thanks so much for joining us at this Six Five Summit. Let's do this again.

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Esam Elashmawi: We should, we should. I really enjoy what you guys do around this summit. It is informative to me when I listen to the other guests as well. And so I really appreciate you having us here and look forward to next year as well.

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Daniel Newman: We look forward to having you back. Thanks for joining us. We're gonna head off for a little break here. Stick with us here at The Six Five Summit.

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