Continuing the three advantages, Lattice drives safety control system design and 5G ORAN deployment with innovation

“In the field of FPGA, Lattice is known for its low power consumption, providing customers with low-power design in the whole process of product development, and on this basis, expands the application of chip functions. From the perspective of development regions, the business contribution of Lattice Asia Pacific region accounts for more than 50% of the world. Facing the Chinese market, Lattice will continue to increase investment in the future, develop a local market development strategy, and further develop its business in China.

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“As the world’s leading supplier of low-power FPGAs, Lattice has been committed to product and technology innovation, providing solutions from the network edge to the cloud for customers in the growing communications computing, industrial automotive and consumer markets.” Lattice Frank Xie, director of application engineering in the Asia-Pacific region of Lattice semiconductor, said that since its establishment in 1983, Lattice has become the world’s largest FPGA supplier with strong technical experience and innovative ideas.

In terms of hardware, Lattice’s unique positioning makes it more competitive than other FPGA suppliers in the market. On the one hand, Lattice provides a wealth of interface protocols for its FPGA products, enabling flexible interconnection between ASICs and dedicated chips; on the other hand, Lattice also provides security-related security control functions.

The biggest feature of Lattice FPGA products is low power consumption. “In terms of process selection, hardware architecture, and chip design, low power consumption is the main direction of Lattice’s efforts.” The relatively fast new product iteration speed and innovation advantages make the product definition more suitable for the needs of any user.

In addition to its long-term commitment to providing low-power FPGA hardware, Lattice has also launched a number of solution collections. From the sensAI solution launched in 2018, to the mVision and Sentry solutions launched in 2020, to last year’s Automate solution, to the first-generation ORAN solution set launched this year. Lattice continues to expand its software system solutions, covering network edge AI, embedded vision, network security root of trust, industrial automation and communications, bringing more value to customers.

Addressing Safety Control System Design Challenges

In the fields of communications, data centers and industrial control, more and more chips are integrated on the control board BOM, and the overall system control architecture is also becoming more and more complex. With the continuous update and iteration of the CPU/SoC process, the I/O interface standard is gradually moving towards a low-voltage trend. The peripheral devices are still stuck at the old 3.3V or 2.5V level, lacking support for 3.3VI/O.

In response to complex system control challenges, Lattice continues to simplify system design and integration, helping customers enhance the system monitoring and control capabilities of their product platforms. “In terms of safety control or system control, MachXO5-NX is actually the fourth or fifth generation product.” According to Xie Zhengfan, MachXO5-NX is manufactured using 28nm FD-SOI process, which is between source and drain. An ultra-thin oxide layer is implanted, which greatly reduces the leakage current between the drain and source of the transistor, and effectively improves the reliability and soft error rate of the FPGA.

In terms of logic unit density, the number of embedded memories, the number of built-in user flash memory, and DSP modules, MachXO5-NX provides customers with more choices of FPGA resources to help customers build more complex logic on the platform. Based on the Nexus platform, the MachXO5-NX chip has up to 300 I/Os, and products of the same scale provide more I/Os and support 3.3V.

MachXO5-NX embedded devices offer up to 2.9 times the memory capacity compared to competing products, minimizing the need for external memory, reducing design size and customer cost; dedicated user flash memory for storing mission-critical data and parameters, the capacity is 36 times higher than that of similar competing products.

In addition, “The biggest differentiating advantage of the Lattice Nexus FPGA platform is the ultra-low soft failure rate. Combined with SEC (soft error correction) and SED (soft error detection) functions, the Lattice Nexus FPGA platform provides the required High reliability.” Xie Zhengfan said that based on this platform, the MachXO5-NX soft failure rate has been reduced by 100 times, greatly improving the system stability of critical safety applications. Static power consumption is reduced by at least 70%, effectively extending battery life, simplifying heat dissipation management, and reducing overall system operating costs.

Overcoming 5G ORAN Deployment Challenges

As mentioned earlier, Lattice has launched four sets of solutions so far, and ORAN is the fifth solution launched by Lattice. According to Karl Lin, Lattice Semiconductor’s Asia Pacific market development director, the Lattice ORAN solution set focuses on increasing security in data transmission and ensuring the security of transmission lines between various security points.

“Because the characteristics of OPEN-RAN allow more suppliers to join, and suppliers need to be interconnected, the increase in interconnection leads to an increase in the demand for security.” In addition, more suppliers, operators and research institutions have joined , the ORAN ecosystem will be more complete, so as to avoid the risks of separate suppliers to the greatest extent, further achieve lower costs and more companies to participate, and bring more innovative technologies and applications.

In addition to security, the ORAN solution collection embodies the low power consumption, small size, robustness, and instant start-up of Lattice FPGA devices. The program is a turnkey solution that includes reference platforms and designs, demos, IP building blocks, FPGA design tools, development boards and custom design services to continuously accelerate customers with robust security performance, high synchronization and low power consumption 5G ORAN deployment and application development and launch.

“In terms of hardware, Lattice provides software for corresponding functions based on existing security control development boards and acceleration synchronization development boards, including encryption and decryption of AES, ECC and eCPRI IP,” said Lin Guosong. “The software is mainly based on Lattice RADIANT and PROPEL. The former is used to develop the logic code of the FPGA itself, and the latter is used for secondary C code development on the soft core IP provided by Lattice.”

Lin Guosong also pointed out that the set of ORAN solutions released this time focuses on the deployment of 5G ORAN with safe, synchronous core and low power consumption. In future versions 2.0 and 3.0, Lattice will continue to develop and provide updated solutions to meet the needs of ease of use and rapid deployment.

Summarize

Lattice continues the frequency of new product releases every six months, and continues to be competitive in the market with innovative technologies. Xie Zhengfan said that the company has a wealth of solutions, focusing more on AI processing for video in the early stage, and there will be solutions for industrial design and machine vision in the future.

In the field of FPGA, Lattice is known for its low power consumption, providing customers with low-power design in the whole process of product development, and on this basis, expands the application of chip functions. From the perspective of development regions, the business contribution of Lattice Asia Pacific region accounts for more than 50% of the world. Facing the Chinese market, Lattice will continue to increase investment in the future, develop a local market development strategy, and further develop its business in China.