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Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor

anandtech.com

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Re: Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor

#11

Post by fleventynine »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #2

> ... we built out a pretty significant portfolio of these applications solutions and they make it very easy for the customer to adopt our devices into their systems... Very disappointing that on the topic of Software/Toolchain it's more of the same business decisions of just copying the Xilinx/Altera paradigm. Since they seemed rather non-agressive towards Yosys/SymbiFlow they made me quite hopeful that Lattice woul…

If we could get similar momentum we have with gcc and LLVM behind projects like yosys and nextpnr, FPGAs would be much more useful and likely be a larger market overall.

I'm willing to personally donate 10k a year to projects like these to liberate myself from crappy vendor tools that I can't improve.

Re: Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor

#12

Post by liaukovv »

amelius wrote: post #4
deelowe wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The secret sauce is in the software. The hardware isn’t that revolutionary. On top of that, fpga vendors have this habit of outsourcing every little thing. This makes it super difficult for them to embrace open source give the IP liabilities.

> The secret sauce is in the software. I'll take my hardware without the sauce, thank you!

That would make hardware a commodity and there is not enough margin in commodoties.

Re: Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor

#13

Post by cushychicken »

I was surprised to hear lotsa talk about FPGAs and basically nothing about HDMI or silicon video tech.

Turns out Lattice bought Silicon Image in 2015, then turned around and sold off the HDMI portion of the business to another company I've never heard of, which was again sold - to Analog Devices.

Huh. Silly me for not paying attention.

Re: Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor

#14

Post by frank0631 »

I like the direction Lattice is going. The bigger FPGA developers Xilinx and Intel are going for bigger, denser, faster, more ultra-ram, and as many LUTs as the chip can handle; Lattice is going for smaller, cheaper, and more accessible. I'm very surprised to hear they're going after low power edge AI, but it's niche markets like that where FPGAs shine!

Re: Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor

#15

Post by HansHamster »

fleventynine wrote: post #11
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #2

> ... we built out a pretty significant portfolio of these applications solutions and they make it very easy for the customer to adopt our devices into their systems... Very disappointing that on the topic of Software/Toolchain it's more of the same business decisions of just copying the Xilinx/Altera paradigm. Since they seemed rather non-agressive towards Yosys/SymbiFlow they made me quite hopeful that Lattice woul…

If we could get similar momentum we have with gcc and LLVM behind projects like yosys and nextpnr, FPGAs would be much more useful and likely be a larger market overall. I'm willing to personally donate 10k a year to projects like these to liberate myself from crappy vendor tools that I can't improve.

And what really annoys me about Lattice in particular is that they shut down their community forum and now there is basically no way to get any form of support when using a free license.

A while ago I found a bug in Lattice Radiant that produced broken PLL configurations. I reproduced this and confirmed that it doesn't happen in their iCECube software, but had no desire to argue with their support about why they should even look at it when I'm not paying $$$ for the software...

I permanently switched to the open toolchain and never had any serious issues since...

Re: Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor

#16

Post by UncleOxidant »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #2

> ... we built out a pretty significant portfolio of these applications solutions and they make it very easy for the customer to adopt our devices into their systems... Very disappointing that on the topic of Software/Toolchain it's more of the same business decisions of just copying the Xilinx/Altera paradigm. Since they seemed rather non-agressive towards Yosys/SymbiFlow they made me quite hopeful that Lattice woul…

I guess I'm not seeing from that quote how they're anti-Yosys/SymbiFlow. Are you saying that they just aren't as helpful towards the open source FPGA tools as they could be? Lattice still seems to be more open towards these kinds of open source tools than Xilinx/Altera by far. Yes, Lattice should probably be more proactive in actually working with the open source developers, but baby steps, I guess.

Re: Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor

#19

Post by dwrodri »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #2

> ... we built out a pretty significant portfolio of these applications solutions and they make it very easy for the customer to adopt our devices into their systems... Very disappointing that on the topic of Software/Toolchain it's more of the same business decisions of just copying the Xilinx/Altera paradigm. Since they seemed rather non-agressive towards Yosys/SymbiFlow they made me quite hopeful that Lattice woul…

As someone with breaking into the hardware space with a software background, I've acquired a newfound appreciation for the amount of work that gets poured into GCC/LLVM toolchains.

Open implementations which acquire enough traction become open standards. I'm doing block-level CPU simulation work for my dissertation, and there's pretty much a wall of abstraction where my work has to stop before it explodes with licensing + compatibility landmines. A rock solid tooling ecosystem I could target for FPGAs and then eventual fabrication would be the dream.

Re: Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor

#20

Post by touisteur »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #2

> ... we built out a pretty significant portfolio of these applications solutions and they make it very easy for the customer to adopt our devices into their systems... Very disappointing that on the topic of Software/Toolchain it's more of the same business decisions of just copying the Xilinx/Altera paradigm. Since they seemed rather non-agressive towards Yosys/SymbiFlow they made me quite hopeful that Lattice woul…

I recently discovered that Xilinx has lots of small R&D things I github. I had the opportunity to work with the team behind FINN (https://xilinx.github.io/finn/) and they're trying to do everything, put everything they develop, on github. I will praise this in every future meeting I have with any Xilinx rep.

I feel this is a mentality change, albeit slow, that is starting to happen. We still don't have source code for Intel MKL, or all of OpenVINO and it bit us in the ass several times, so much I'm really trying to find ANY OTHER SOLUTION and pay the perf hit, if I can own and debug it. I'm not even asking for github or even publicly available tarballs, but 'I paid I want the source and I want to be able to look inside to be autonomous'. Make it OSS without community involvement, for all I care, but dammit let your paying customers look and debug. Let us automatize, let us own the tech.

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