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Lattice Semiconductor sells small, low-power programmable chips that give electronics their custom brains, plus the software and licenses that make them easy to use.
Lattice Semiconductor makes the tiny programmable chips that sit inside all kinds of electronics and let the manufacturer add a custom function without designing a whole new chip from scratch. These chips are called FPGAs, or field-programmable gate arrays, and the simple way to think about them is Lego for circuits: instead of being permanently wired to do one job, they can be configured and reconfigured in software to do whatever the designer needs. Lattice's specialty is the low-power end of that market — chips that sip electricity rather than gulp it — which matters enormously in battery-powered and always-on devices.
Its customers are mostly other companies, not consumers. Industrial equipment makers, automakers, communications gear builders, data-center operators, and consumer electronics brands buy Lattice chips, then pay again for the design software and intellectual property licenses that make those chips usable. That second part matters: hardware gets a customer in the door, but the software and IP keep them there, because engineers learn one toolchain and don't want to relearn it. The company also sells design services to help customers get their products to market faster. The business has been repositioning itself around what management calls "small, low-power, secure" chips, with a particular push into server and data-center customers — the kind of buyers who need a little programmable chip to handle power management or security chores alongside big processors. It competes with much larger programmable-chip makers like AMD, which owns Xilinx, and Intel, which owns Altera, so Lattice's edge is being the specialist that wins on power efficiency and size rather than raw computing muscle.
Lattice is a fabless chip company: it designs the chips and outsources the actual manufacturing to contract foundries, which keeps its capital spending light and lets it focus on design and software. That model makes it flexible, but it also means it depends heavily on a small number of manufacturing partners and on the health of the industrial and automotive markets, which are cyclical and can swing hard. It is headquartered in Hillsboro, Oregon.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026