In the early 1980s, the semiconductor industry was undergoing a transformation. The personal computer revolution was gaining momentum, telecommunications networks were digitizing, and a new category of chips—programmable logic devices that could be configured by customers after manufacturing rather than fixed at the factory—was emerging as a critical enabler of faster product development cycles and lower design risk. On April 3, 1983, in Hillsboro, Oregon, within the region that would become known as the Silicon Forest, C. Norman Winningstad, Rahul Sud, and Ray Capece incorporated Lattice International Inc. to exploit this opportunity. Winningstad, a successful entrepreneur who had founded Floating Point Systems, provided seed funding and credibility. Sud, an Indian-born chip designer who had worked at Intel and Inmos, contributed the technical vision. Capece, who had experience raising venture capital, handled financing. The founders targeted the gap between fixed-function ASICs, which were expensive and time-consuming to design, and costly, high-end FPGAs from Xilinx and Altera, which were overkill for many applications. Lattice's initial focus was on programmable logic devices (PLDs) and complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs)—simpler, more affordable programmable chips that could be designed using PC-based software tools, dramatically shortening time-to-market for OEMs in computing and communications. The company was incorporated in Oregon in 1983 and reincorporated in Delaware in 1985. Early growth was promising but chaotic. The founders, despite their technical and financial talents, lacked operational management experience. They leased an extravagant 140,000-square-foot building, catered expensive employee breakfasts, and reportedly gave one worker a Porsche for Christmas. The company's posh, fake-marble lobby was enough to turn away at least one investment banker. Production schedules slipped, and Lattice's first product—a high-speed memory chip introduced in 1985—flopped amid an industry downturn. A promising programmable memory chip was killed when Monolithic Memories filed a patent infringement suit. By 1986, Lattice had lost $7 million on sales of the same amount. Co-founder Sud left as president in December 1986, and the board brought in Winningstad to stabilize the company. But it was too late. In July 1987, Lattice filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, just four years after its founding. The reorganization was swift—Lattice emerged after 62 to 88 days, moved to a smaller building in Hillsboro, and slashed headcount from 140 to 64 employees. Cyrus Tsui, a Chinese-born semiconductor executive with experience at AMD, Fairchild, and Monolithic Memories, became CEO in 1988 and provided the operational discipline that had been missing. Under Tsui, Lattice focused on its most promising product line: General Array Logic (GAL) devices, low-density programmable chips used to link microprocessors in consumer electronics and computers. The company went public on November 9, 1989, with an IPO on the NASDAQ at $6 per share, raising almost $14 million. A secondary offering in July 1990 raised an additional $22.6 million. Tsui then pivoted Lattice toward high-density programmable logic devices, introducing the company's first FPGA family in March 1992—three months ahead of schedule. Revenues grew from $14 million in 1988 to $64.5 million in 1991, and net income turned positive. The 1990s brought steady growth as Lattice rode the networking and telecommunications boom, with revenue reaching $366 million by 2000 and profits of $160 million. The dot-com bust, however, devastated the company. For the next five years, Lattice recorded no annual profit. A series of CEOs—Steve Skaggs (2005), Bruno Guilmart (2008), Darin Billerbeck (2010)—struggled to find a coherent strategy amid intensifying competition from Xilinx and Altera. The 2011 acquisition of SiliconBlue for $63.2 million added ultra-low-power FPGA technology that would become the foundation of the iCE40 family. The 2015 acquisition of Silicon Image for $606 million expanded Lattice into video connectivity and interface IP, though the deal would later require significant portfolio rationalization. The most dramatic moment in Lattice's modern history came in 2016–2017, when Canyon Bridge Capital Partners, a private equity firm backed by Chinese capital, announced a $1.3 billion agreement to acquire Lattice. In September 2017, President Donald Trump blocked the deal on national security grounds based on a recommendation from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), making Lattice one of the highest-profile casualties of US-China technology tensions. The blocked acquisition forced Lattice to commit to a standalone strategy. In 2018, activist investor Lion Point Capital acquired a 6% stake and pushed for board changes. That same year, Jim Anderson, former AMD computing and graphics chief, was appointed CEO. Anderson's tenure from September 2018 to June 2024 was transformative: he refocused Lattice entirely on low-power FPGAs, divested non-core assets, streamlined the product portfolio, and drove annual revenue from $386 million in 2018 to a peak of $737 million in 2023. The stock price increased nearly tenfold during his tenure. Anderson's sudden departure in June 2024 to become CEO of Coherent Corp. sent Lattice shares plunging 16% in a single day, but the board moved quickly, appointing Ford Tamer—a former Inphi CEO with deep experience in semiconductors, networking, and electro-optics—as permanent CEO in September 2024. Under Tamer, Lattice has navigated the post-Anderson transition while positioning for its next growth phase, culminating in the May 2026 announcement of the $1.65 billion AMI acquisition that would redefine the company's strategic trajectory.