Instead, Lattice (Hillsboro, Ore.) will focus on the mid-range and other growing PLD segments, leaving rivals Altera Corp. and Xilinx Inc. to battle at the bleeding-edge of the tough FPGA market. Recently, Altera and Xilinx have separately announced 40-nm FPGA parts for the high-end.

On Monday (Feb. 23), Lattice expanded its mid-range line, rolling out its first 65-nm FPGAs. But at the high-end, ''we will not have a follow-on product'' to its current FPGA line, said Shakeel Peera, director of strategic marketing for SRAM FPGAs at Lattice.

Lattice's high-end line, dubbed the LatticeSC/M (System Chip/MACO), is based on a 90-nm technology from Fujitsu Ltd. The LatticeSC/M family of FPGAs combines a high-performance FPGA fabric, 3.8-Gbps Serdes, 2-Gbps parallel I/Os, embedded RAM, and embedded ASIC blocks.

Lattice will apparently continue to sell and support the SC/M, but the company does not appear to be working on a 65-nm version or beyond. In other words, the company will not chase Moore's Law. ''We're getting off the conveyor belt,'' said Doug Hunter, vice president of corporate marketing at Lattice.

It's no wonder. The design and IC production costs are soaring out of control for 45-/40-nm designs and beyond. And unlike Altera and Xilinx, Lattice does not have the resources, size or economies of scale to be all things to all people, analysts said. It must focus on higher growth markets, analysts said.

And amid the downturn, Lattice also must watch the bottom line, as the company has reported eight consecutive quarterly losses. Lattice has not reported a quarterly profit since the fourth quarter of 2006.

The company justified its new strategy. Many of today's new and emerging applications ''can be met with mid-range FPGAs,'' Peera said. ''There is room for high-end FPGAs, (but) premium FPGAs are a thing of the past for most applications,'' he said. ''They are pricey. They also take up a lot of power consumption.''