Lattice FPGas are powering the development of wind energy and creating a sustainable, connected world

Nowadays, technology continues to evolve rapidly, affecting every aspect of our lives, and the rapid development of artificial intelligence has further promoted technological advances, enabling systems and data centers also require more and more energy. This leads to increased e-waste and CO2 emissions. In fact, servers and cooling systems account for the largest share of direct electricity consumption in U.S. data centers and are among the most carbon-intensive areas today.

More and more companies are looking to adopt sustainable practices in all aspects of their business. In order to achieve more sustainable operations, they seek opportunities and solutions to minimize the environmental impact of existing and new infrastructure and technologies, thereby reducing energy consumption and e-waste generation.

As a leading supplier of low-power programmable devices, sustainability is deeply rooted in Lattice's mission. Lattice has a strong and growing portfolio of innovative, low-power solutions that help customers achieve their sustainability goals and make a significant difference in people's lives.

Lattice FPGA on the move

Power consumption and dimensional efficiency are the core guiding principles of all Lattice product innovations. This principle helps our more than 9,000 customers worldwide reduce system power consumption and design size without sacrificing performance.

A great example of using Lattice technology to create a more sustainable connected world is Lattice's collaboration with Barman Electronics, a global supplier of automation to the wind and renewable energy, industrial machinery manufacturing and maritime industries. Bachmann uses Lattice FPGas to improve the efficiency and lifetime of wind farms. Previous, older wind turbines were time-consuming and expensive to run - and faced problems such as failure accumulation, unavailability of spare parts, and increased unproductive downtime. With Bahman's proven retrofit solutions, wind energy producers can now stay competitive by increasing productivity and extending the life of their plants.

Specifically, Bahlmann used the easily customizable Lattice FPGA for its wind turbine control retrofit solution. The program helps turbine owners and operators increase energy production while reducing service and maintenance costs and extending the life of their assets. With Lattice FPGas, Bahlmann offers a more durable, flexible and customizable solution for wind turbines, ultimately helping to reduce the cost of renewable energy and make it more affordable.

Sustainability throughout design

Lattice's emphasis on low power consumption and small package size, combined with the FPGA's own reprogrammable nature, is expected to bring significant energy potential and reduce e-waste to future generations of enterprise and consumer technologies.

Because all Lattice FPGas can be reprogrammed without restriction, they help extend product life and reduce wear and tear over the life of the product or system. This also benefits developers, helping them respond to changing technology needs without having to replace entire products or systems, thereby avoiding the creation of unnecessary e-waste. In addition, Lattice FPGas can be programmed to implement adaptive fan algorithms and predictive maintenance functions to optimize energy use based on the dynamic needs of the system.

Lattice is a pioneer in the creation of sustainable technology, and the Lattice Avant™ and Lattice Nexus™ FPGA platforms were awarded the 2023 SEAL Innovation in Sustainability Award and the 2023 Environment + Energy Leadership Award, respectively, for their design philosophy of low power consumption.

Lattice's Avant FPGA platform offers best-in-class low power, advanced interconnect and optimized computing power for a wide range of mid-range FPGA applications. Lattice Avant was born out of customer feedback and their need for powerful mid-range FPGA solutions that combined the right functionality, power consumption and size to help them achieve their design goals. Compared to competing devices, Lattice Avant delivers 2.5 times higher energy efficiency, 2 times higher throughput, and 6 times smaller package size. In addition, it is estimated that the energy savings from using Lattice Avant FPGas could power 38,000 homes (at 30 KWH/day) over a decade compared to comparable devices.

The Lattice Nexus FPGA platform, on the other hand, is the foundation of the small FPGA portfolio, and developers can choose between high performance mode or low power operation mode, ensuring that power consumption and thermal management needs are met in a sustainable way. With Lattice's Nexus platform, developers can program matrix bias to support high performance or low power consumption to adjust FPGas to best meet the power and thermal management needs of their applications. This will not only save power consumption on battery-powered network edge devices, but also reduce the high power costs associated with industrial and data center operations. Lattice estimates that FPgas based on the Nexus platform will consume 75% less power than comparable competitors.

Building a sustainable technology future together

As energy consumption and technological advances continue to accelerate, now is a critical time to adopt sustainable technologies that will help reduce the rapid consumption of energy and the accumulation of e-waste.

Lattice FPGA solutions support some of the most important technology applications of the next decade and beyond, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, 5G telecommunications infrastructure, smart vehicles, industrial automation, robotics, and security. We are committed to working with customers like Bahman to help them reduce power consumption and design efficiently, achieving their sustainability goals without compromising their design and innovation goals.