Lattice Semiconductor operates a focused, lucrative 'fabless' manufacturing model that insulates the company from the crushing, multi-billion-dollar capital expenditure requirements of traditional chipmaking. The company explicitly does not own the complex foundries (fabs) that physically print the silicon wafers; instead, it outsources all manufacturing to foundries like TSMC while focusing its own capital entirely on high-margin architectural design and software. Lattice generates extremely high profit margins by dominating a specialized, unglamorous niche: designing cheap, ultra-low-power, flexible chips known as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Unlike power-hungry AI processors from Nvidia or AMD that cost thousands of dollars, Lattice chips often cost just a few dollars and are used for critical 'glue logic'—instantly managing power sequencing, processing basic sensor data, or providing hardware security on complex server motherboards. Because these tiny chips are cheap but mission-critical to the operation of a $20,000 server or industrial robot, Lattice benefits from immense, pricing power. Lattice wraps its hardware in integrated, proprietary software stacks. Once an engineer builds a system using Lattice's software and architecture, the incredible friction and cost of rewriting that code for a competitor's chip creates vast, sticky customer retention, locking in predictable recurring revenue streams for decades. Lattice's low power draw also makes its FPGAs increasingly attractive for edge-AI applications, where inference must happen on-device rather than in a power-hungry data center.