1/22/2024 0 Comments Lattice semiconductor competitionsGenerally speaking, FPGAs are more difficult to code for but are much more efficient than a microprocessor or controller. I believe the degree of success in the new Lattice Nexus platform will be directly related to how easy the company makes its software to use. CrossLink-NX appears to be a great first implementation of Nexus. Lattice clearly understands the growing need for low-power, edge devices, and with this new platform, it is poised to capitalize on it. In many ways, I see this as a culmination of everything the “new Lattice” has been working on under Jim Anderson. Nexus marks a new era in Lattice Semiconductor’s transformation over the past several years. Also, the Lattice senior management is very conservative, so I think these are fair comparisons. I didn’t run these tests myself so I can’t vouch for them 100%, but when I look t was tested, it seemed apples-to-apples to me. Here is a link to a video that analyst colleague Mark Vena took: Customers can leverage Nexus easily to deliver intelligent Edge embedded vision and I believe doing this at the Edge helps reduce concerns around data latency, cost and privacy. This was done at half power, 2x performance over Lattice prior FPGAs. This is a very common AI app for consumer/smart home, but also industrial and auto. We normally see these competitive demos from AMD and Intel, but not in FPGAs, and I appreciated them a lot.ĭemo #1 - Human presence detection running on CrossLink-NX analyzes video streams in real-time and identifies and counts people. Lattice uncharacteristically showed some hard-hitting demos to show off its technologies. In particular, they cited the off-the-shelf IP that Lattice offers for it FPGAs really helped shrink design time so they could get applications developed fast. Waymo said that Lattice provided great support and the Lattice Diamond software design tool was powerful and easy to use. Not only were they were surprised to find CrossLink-NX to be smaller and to consume much less power than what they’d come to expect from FPGAs, they also found CrossLink-NX easy to work with, even if they hadn’t worked with FPGAs in previous designs. Waymo, an autonomous car technology developer (formerly Google’s self-driving car project), said while FPGAs are known for providing strong processing performance, most of their developers saw them as physically too large and too power hungry for the ADAS applications they’re developing. Using a low power FPGA like CrossLink-NX to handle video processing functions in the body camera helps keep it small and low power Axon estimates they were able to cut the length and weight a body camera system by half using CrossLink-NX. As you can imagine, someone wearing a body camera would want it to be as small and light weight as possible, but perform for extended periods of time without a battery charge. To illustrate, Lattice had two customers join them onstage, Axon and Waymo.Īxon develops camera systems for law enforcement and first responders, including body cameras. They told Lattice it’s all about low power, high performance and reliability. In the early development of CrossLink-NX, Lattice informed the product’s development by meeting with 65+ customers to hear firsthand about design challenges they face when building devices that support Edge computing. Lattice also says CrossLink-NX supports the high temperature grades of industrial settings, with automotive grade purportedly coming soon. This is crucial for mission-critical applications that can’t afford downtime and absolutely must be safe and reliable. Thanks to Lattice Nexus, it features a soft error rate up to 100 times lower than similar competing FPGAs. It features two operating modes-high performance or low power-and according to Lattice, provides “excellent” control over current leakage. It claims up to a 75% reduction in power compared to its competition and is available in tiny form factors-from 36mm 2 to 100mm 2. An extension of its CrossLink Plus offering launched in October (see my coverage here) CrossLink-NX claims to deliver all of the things the Lattice Nexus platform promised to enable. This brings us to CrossLink-NX, Lattice’s first product on the new Nexus platform. Additionally, according to Lattice, the insulated gate of the platform’s FD-SOI technology makes the platform highly reliable-it features a soft error rate, purportedly as much as 100 times lower than some competitors’ devices. As for its performance capabilities, Lattice Nexus delivers ultra-fast, 3 ms I/O boot, 2.5 Gbps MIPI D-PHY, and 0.5 Mbit RAM blocks for the purpose of processing acceleration in in embedded vision, Edge AI, and other inferencing applications.
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