Company type | Public |
---|---|
| |
Industry | Semiconductors |
Founded | 1983 |
Headquarters | Hillsboro, Oregon, U.S. 45°31′38″N122°55′36″W / 45.527216°N 122.926626°W |
Key people | Ford Tamer (CEO) |
Products | |
Revenue | US$737 million (2023) |
US$212 million (2023) | |
US$259 million (2023) | |
Total assets | US$841 million (2023) |
Total equity | US$692 million (2023) |
Number of employees | 1,156 (2023) |
Website | latticesemi.com |
Footnotes /references [1] |
Lattice Semiconductor Corporation is an American semiconductor company specializing in the design and manufacturing of low power field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). [2] Headquartered in the Silicon Forest area of Hillsboro, Oregon, [3] the company also has operations in San Jose, Calif., [4] Shanghai, [5] Manila, [6] Penang, [4] and Singapore. [7] Lattice Semiconductor has more than 1000 employees and an annual revenue of more than $660 million as of 2022. [8] The company was founded in 1983 and went public in 1989. It is traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the symbol LSCC.
Lattice was founded on April 3, 1983, by C. Norman Winningstad, Rahul Sud, and Ray Capece, [9] with investment from Winningstad, Harry Merlo, Tom Moyer, and John Piacentini. [9] Lattice was incorporated in Oregon in 1983 and reincorporated in Delaware in 1985. Co-founder Sud left as president in December 1986, and Winningstad left in 1991 as chairman of the board. [9] Early struggles led to chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization in July 1987. [9] The company emerged from bankruptcy after 62 days and moved from its headquarters in an unincorporated area near Beaverton to a smaller building in Hillsboro, Oregon. [10] Over the next year, the company shrank from 140 to 64 employees but posted record revenues. [11]
Cyrus Tsui became the company's chief executive officer in 1988. [12] On November 9, 1989, Lattice became a publicly traded company when its shares were listed on the NASDAQ after in initial public offering. [13] The initial share price was $6, and raised almost $14 million for the company. [13] In July 1990, a second stock offering of nearly 1.5 million new shares raised $22.6 million at $16.25 per share. [14]
In 1995, the company attempted to assert trademark rights in the term Silicon Forest beyond the use of its trademark for the use in semiconductor devices. [15] They had registered the mark in 1985, but later conceded they could not prevent the usage of the term as a noun. [15] Forbes ranked the company as their 162nd best small company in the United States in 1996, [16] and Lattice began to double the size of its Hillsboro headquarters. [12]
In 2000, annual revenues topped $560 million with profits of $160 million. [17] Its stock price reached an all-time high of $41.34, adjusted for splits. [17] For the next five years, however, the company recorded no annual profit.
Lattice purchased Agere Corporation's FPGA division in 2002. [18] In 2004, the company settled charges with the United States government that it had illegally exported certain technologies to China, paying a fine of $560,000. [19] In 2005, Tsui was replaced as CEO by Steve Skaggs [18] and the company laid off employees for the first time. [18] In fiscal year 2006, Lattice posted a profit of $3.1 million on revenues of $245.5 million, the first annual profit since 2000. [20]
In June 2008, Bruno Guilmart was named as chief executive officer of the company, replacing Steve Skaggs. [21] For fiscal year 2008, Lattice had a loss of $32 million on annual revenues of $222.3 million. [22] In 2009, the company began moving all of its warehouse operations for parts from Oregon to Singapore. [23] Through July 2009, the company had lost money for ten straight quarters, [24] and had its first profitable quarter in three years during the fourth quarter of 2009. [25] Bruno Guilmart left the company in August 2010, and Darin Billerbeck, former Zilog CEO, who had just sold Zilog in the previous year, was named the new CEO in October of that year, starting in November. [26] The company reported 2011 revenue of $318 million. [27] Lattice started a stock buy-back program in 2010 that continued into 2012 that would total about $35 million if fully implemented. [28]
In 2011, the company was ranked third among the world's makers of field programmable gate array (FPGA) devices [29] and second for CPLDs & SPLDs. [30] On December 9, 2011, Lattice announced it was acquiring SiliconBlue for $63.2 million in cash. [31] [32] [33] Lattice announced in July 2012 a foundry agreement with United Microelectronics Corporation. [34] Lattice returned to profitability in 2013 with a profit of $22.3 million on $332.5 million in revenues. [35] The company acquired Silicon Image Inc. for $606 million in March 2015 [36] and moved company headquarters to Downtown Portland. [37]
In April 2016, Tsinghua Holdings said in a U.S. filing that it accumulated a roughly 6 percent stake in Lattice Semiconductor through share purchased on the open market. [38] In November, 2016, Canyon Bridge Capital Partners, a private equity firm backed by China Reform Holdings Corporation announced a definitive agreement to acquire all of Lattice's shares. [39] The purchase of Lattice by Canyon Bridge was in September 2017 blocked by US President Donald Trump based on the recommendation of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States on national security grounds under the Exon–Florio Amendment. [40] [41] [42] [43] The company re-located its headquarters back to its Hillsboro campus in 2019. [44]
Activist investor Lion Point Capital purchased a six percent stake in Lattice in February 2018. [45] The next month the company filled three new seats on its board with independent directors supported by Lion Point. [46] That same year, Lattice replaced several members of its leadership team, including bringing in a new president and CEO, Jim Anderson, who previously worked at Advanced Micro Devices. [47] Under the new leadership, Lattice shifted the company's focus entirely to low-power field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). [48] Lattice acquired computer vision software company Mirametrix in November 2021. [49] [50]
Jim Anderson left Lattice in June 2024, at which time Lattice Chief Strategy and Marketing office Esam Elashmawi was appointed Interim CEO. On September 16, 2024, Lattice named Ford Tamer as CEO.
Lattice primarily focuses on small, efficient low-power field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). [51] [48] It also sells programmable mixed-signal and interconnect products, related software and intellectual property (IP), [52] for applications from edge computing [53] to cloud computing. [54] Lattice's main products are those based on its Lattice Nexus small FPGA platform [55] and Lattice Avant mid-range FPGA platform. [56] Lattice products are used in a variety of end uses across the communication, computing (client and datacenter), industrial, automotive, and consumer electronics markets. [21]
Lattice's software offerings include design tools Diamond, [57] Radiant, [58] and Propel. [59] It also provides solution stacks designed to provide its customers with application-specific toolkits to help them more easily and quickly design with Lattice technology. As of 2023, these include Lattice mVision, designed for machine vision in power-constrained designs; [60] Lattice sensAI, designed to integrate machine learning into internet of things applications; [61] Lattice Automate, designed to facilitate industrial applications like robotics and real-time networking in settings like automated factories and warehouses; [62] Lattice Sentry, for security; [63] and Lattice Drive for automotive applications. [64]
The company is headquartered in Hillsboro, Oregon, in the high-tech area known as the Silicon Forest. [3] The company employs more than 1000 people worldwide as of 2023. Ford Tamer is Lattice's chief executive officer. Its chief competitors are Xilinx (a subsidiary of AMD) and Intel (former Altera business). [65] After AMD completed the acquisition of Xilinx in February 2022, Lattice Semiconductor became the last fully independent major manufacturer of FPGAs.
Silicon Forest is a Washington County cluster of high-tech companies located in the Portland metropolitan area in the U.S. state of Oregon. The term most frequently refers to the industrial corridor between Beaverton and Hillsboro in northwest Oregon. The high-technology industry accounted for 19 percent of Oregon's economy in 2005, and the Silicon Forest name has been applied to the industry throughout the state in such places as Corvallis, Bend, and White City. Nevertheless, the name refers primarily to the Portland metropolitan area, where about 1,500 high-tech firms were located as of 2006.
Radisys Corporation is an American technology company located in Hillsboro, Oregon, United States that makes technology used by telecommunications companies in mobile networks. Founded in 1987 in Oregon by former employees of Intel, the company went public in 1995. The company's products are used in mobile network applications such as small cell radio access networks, wireless core network elements, deep packet inspection and policy management equipment; conferencing, and media services including voice, video and data. In 2015, the first-quarter revenues of Radisys totaled $48.7 million, and approximately employed 700 people. Arun Bhikshesvaran is the company's chief executive officer.
Electric Lightwave, was originally formed in 1988, by John Warta, John Rivenburgh, Earl Kamsky and Richard Furnival. The company was formed to compete with US West and GTE in the Pacific Northwest. Portland General Electric was an initial investor, then Citizens Utilities became the largest investor in 1990. ELI became the first company to compete locally in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and one of the first in California and Arizona.
Teledyne FLIR LLC, formerly FLIR Systems Inc,, a subsidiary of Teledyne Technologies, specializes in the design and production of thermal imaging cameras and sensors. Its main customers are governments and in 2020, approximately 31% of its revenues were from the federal government of the United States and its agencies.
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TriQuint Semiconductor was a semiconductor company that designed, manufactured, and supplied high-performance RF modules, components and foundry services. The company was founded in 1985 in Beaverton, Oregon before moving to neighboring Hillsboro, Oregon. In February 2014, Greensboro, North Carolina-based RF Micro Devices and TriQuint announced a merger in which the new company would be Qorvo, Inc., with the merger completed on January 1, 2015.
The Pamplin Media Group (PMG) is a media conglomerate owned by Carpenter Media Group and operating primarily in the Portland metropolitan area in the U.S. state of Oregon. Robert B. Pamplin, Jr. founded the company in 2001 and sold it to Carpenter in 2024. As of 2019, the company owns 25 newspapers and employs 200 people.
Phoseon Technology is a privately owned electronic manufacturing company based in Hillsboro in the U.S. state of Oregon. Founded in 2002, the company makes products that use ultraviolet light produced by light emitting diodes (LED) that are used for curing products in industrial settings. Phoseon is located in the Portland metropolitan area and has offices in Europe and Asia. Bill Cortelyou is the chief executive officer and president of the firm.
ClearEdge Power, Inc. was a fuel cell manufacturer focusing on the stationary fuel cell. It was headquartered in South Windsor, Connecticut, U.S. The company employed 225 people as of August 2011. It closed its operations in Connecticut in April 2014, and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May 2014. The company's assets were purchased out of bankruptcy by Doosan Fuel Cell America, Inc.
Electro Scientific Industries, Inc. (ESI) is an American high technology company headquartered in the Portland, Oregon, metropolitan area, specifically in Beaverton, Oregon, since 2021, but from 1963–2021, it was based in the unincorporated Cedar Mill area just north of Beaverton. ESI is a developer and supplier of photonic and laser systems for microelectronics manufacturers. Founded in 1944, it is the oldest high-tech company in Oregon. Along with Tektronix, and later Intel, it has spawned numerous technology-based companies in the Portland area, an area known as the Silicon Forest. From 1983 to 2019, shares in the company were publicly traded on NASDAQ, under the ticker symbol ESIO.
C. Norman (Norm) Winningstad was an American engineer and businessman in the state of Oregon. A native of California, he served in the U.S. Navy during World War II before working at what is now Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. After moving north to Oregon, he started working for Tektronix before starting several companies in what became the Silicon Forest in the Portland metropolitan area. He founded or helped to found Floating Point Systems, Lattice Semiconductor, and Thrustmaster. Winningstad and his wife were also noted philanthropists in the Portland area, with a theater at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts named in his wife Dolores' honor.
Cascade Microtech is a semiconductor test equipment manufacturer based in Beaverton in the Portland metropolitan area of the United States. Founded in 1983, the Oregon-based company employs nearly 400 people. Formerly publicly traded company as CSCD on the NASDAQ, the company is now fully merged with FormFactor, Inc.
MathStar, Inc., was an American, fabless semiconductor company based in Oregon. Founded in Minnesota in 1999, the company moved to the Portland metropolitan area where it remained until it completed a reverse merger with Sajan, Inc. in 2010. MathStar never made a profit after raising $137 million over the lifetime of the company, including via several stock offerings while the company was publicly traded on the NASDAQ market. The company's only product was a field programmable object array (FPOA) chip.
Act-On Software is a software-as-a-service product for marketing automation. The company is headquartered in Portland, Oregon and was founded in 2008, originally retailing its software exclusively through Cisco, which provided $2 million in funding.
Enli Health Intelligence was a privately held software company based in Beaverton, Oregon, and previously in Hillsboro, Oregon. Founded in 2001 as Kryptiq Corporation, the company specialized in electronic medical records and secure communications between physicians and patients. The 125-employee company was purchased by Surescripts in 2012, which was a previous investor in the company. Annual revenues at the time of the sale were approximately $25 million. In January 2015, the company announced that it was splitting from Surescripts and becoming independent again. Later in 2015, it was renamed Enli Health Intelligence. In 2021, it was acquired by Cedar Gate Technologies, which discontinued use of the Enli name.
Sol Republic, Inc. was an American privately held audio manufacturer based in Michigan. Founded in 2011 by Scott Hix, Seth Combs, and Kevin Lee, it was sold to HoMedics in late 2015 or early 2016.
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Qorvo, Inc. is an American multinational company specializing in products for wireless, wired, and power markets. The company was created by the merger of TriQuint Semiconductor and RF Micro Devices, which was announced in 2014 and completed on January 1, 2015. It trades on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol QRVO. The headquarters for the company originally were in both Hillsboro, Oregon, and Greensboro, North Carolina, but in mid-2016 the company began referring to its North Carolina site as its exclusive headquarters.
Oregon Venture Fund makes venture investments in the Portland, Oregon area and throughout Oregon and SW Washington. The fund consists of 180 institutional and angel investors, of whom 85% have run or founded a business. The fund evaluates up to 300 business plans per year, selecting five to seven to invest in annually. In 2018, the fund changed its name from Oregon Angel Fund to Oregon Venture Fund and launched a new $30M fund. Since its inception, Oregon Venture Fund has generated an average annual rate of return of 34% and a return on investment exceeding $3.50 for each dollar invested.
PacStar, part of Curtiss-Wright Corporation's Defense Solutions Division, is a developer and manufacturer of tactical communication and information technology infrastructure hardware and software based in Portland, Oregon. The company was founded in 2000 in Oregon as a reseller of advanced networking and communication equipment and in 2005 began manufacturing communications systems of its own design. The company has multi-million dollar deals with several branches of the US military and also supplies rugged networking equipment to commercial industries. The formerly privately held company was acquired by Curtiss-Wright in late 2020.
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