The Knowledge theory basically explains that a certain company's competitive advantage lies within its knowledge. They will try to protect their research and knowledge from anything because they know that if others have this knowledge they could lose their completive advantage.
             Lattice Corporation seeks to protect their products and wafer fabrication process technologies primarily through patents, trade secrecy measures, copyrights, mask work protection, trademark registrations, licensing restrictions, confidentiality agreements and other approaches designed to protect proprietary information. There can be no assurance that others may not independently develop competitive technology not covered by Lattice's intellectual property rights or that measures they take to protect their technology will be effective(10k report Lattice Semiconductor, 2003).
             The following table represents the number of Patents issued to the respective company by the US Patent and Trade Office per year. This numbers were retrieved through their patents search engine.
             From the above table you can see that Xilinx Corporation has developed the most patents between 2000 and 2003. Xilinx is the largest competitor for Lattice. In 2003, Xilinx secured over 50% of the PLD market share and is bigger than all other public PLD companies combined. It has partnered with some large companies, such as IBM, WindRiver Systems, and Conexant, to develop new technology, and then becomes more competitive in the market. The company focuses on innovation. That is why Xilinx has registered more patents than Lattice from 2000 to 2003. Lattice also focuses on innovation but they are a lot smaller then Xilinx so lattice can not put as much money into research and development as Xilinx.
             However, Lattice is the only company that has a steady growth in the number
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