Additional opinions on Lattice vs. Altera.......
To: Eric Strohmeyer
From: Gregg Judge
Mar 13 1996 1:19PM EST
Reply #163
Eric Strohmeyer:
I must admit that I don't follow Lattice as closely as Altera, Xilinx, and Actel. However, I'm impressed with their ISP product line which is very fast and suitable for the pc motherboard and single-board-computer markets (not to mention telecom, datacomm, etc). Lattice's current offering goes up to 14,000 gates. BUT, PLD "gates" don't necessarily correlate well with gate-array gates (the industry measurement) due to the architectural differences between a gate array and PLD (but I digress....).
I liked their recent product announcement for a 25K gate family with 4K embedded RAM modules (1-port, 2-port, and FIFO). Lattice is attempting to position themselves to take advantage of the systems integration trends in logic design. These devices should be able to implement complex bus interfaces and co-processing functions at very high speed (the press release states 125MHz counters). Taking into account a conservative "marketing fudge factor" of 25%, they're still talking about 100Mhz systems speeds which is blazing fast for programmable logic.
Another thing I like about them is that if you open ANY engineering trade rag, you'll see several boards with 1 or more Lattice devices. They've got a loyal installed customer base whom they'll be able to service with these new products, which, I believe, will be a big hit. Customers continually want to integrate more logic into fewer devices (no secret here) and Lattice will be able to provide a migration path for their current customers while offering something a tad bit different than the other guys.
The high-density game (20K to 200K gates - my definition) is another matter. The lattice architecture will not scale well to high density devices for several reasons. If it did, the gate array guys and FPGA guys would have been there a long time ago. (Todd Cope posted
the compelling reasons earlier). If Lattice is going to play in the
high-density game with Altera, Actel, ATT and Xilinx, I believe they
will have to adopt a new architecture. The aforementioned 4 companies,
and a few others, are ALL working on architectures to support 200K
gates (or more) in the near future.
Lattice has focused on the 3V product line, which I agree with. 3V is going to be the norm eventually and they will have products to meet the need. There's TONS of designs which require mid-density (1-8k gates) which run at high speed (30+ MHz) and can run at 3V. Memory and Processors are already tuned to run at 3V and Lattice can interface directly with these devices. Lattice is well positioned to garner some of this business.
I was concerned that Lattice's ONLY differentiator was ISP. Altera and AMD and Xilinx are jumping on the ISP bandwagon which could present lots of price competition. But, Lattice and Actel are the only programmable logic suppliers with application-specific embeded RAM blocks. Altera and Xilinx's RAM are fairly generic and can't meet the performance that Actel's and Lattice's product info claims for embedded FIFO's.
Good Luck!
-- Gregg |
