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A Chinese state-owned firm tasked with building the country's semiconductor sector is retesting U.S. waters by buying a small stake in a chip maker whose exports to China are restricted due to their military applications.

Tsinghua Unigroup Ltd. said in a U.S. regulatory filing on Wednesday that it has accumulated a roughly 6% stake in Portland, Ore.-based Lattice Semiconductor Corp. through share purchases on the open market. It comes after Tsinghua Unigroup made an unsuccessful attempt last year to acquire U.S. memory-chip maker Micron Technology Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.

Lattice makes low-power programmable microprocessors that can be customized to run high-tech systems such as data centers and telecommunications networks, as well as military gear such as missile guidance systems.

While Tsinghua's investment is modest at $41.6 million, it suggests Chinese interest in this technology. China's recent semiconductor investments have focused on more mainstream technologies such as smartphone processors and flash memory chips, as the country seeks to build a competitive chip sector.

China's leaders have promised as much as 1 trillion yuan, or up to $154 billion, in funding for chip development and it has encouraged companies like Tsinghua Unigroup to pursue overseas investments.

For Tsinghua Unigroup, the Lattice investment appears to be a test to see if a modest investment would be allowed without running afoul of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. on national security grounds. The committee, known as CFIUS, is charged with determining whether any foreign acquisitions or investments pose a security threat—and if it decides that it does, the transaction could be blocked.

In a telephone interview Thursday, Tsinghua Unigroup Chairman Zhao Weiguo said he didn't expect the investment would require review due to the small stake size and the fact that Tsinghua Unigroup isn't obtaining access to Lattice technology.

"This is purely a financial investment," he said. "We don't have any intention at all to try to acquire Lattice."

Two larger U.S. investment attempts by Mr. Zhao last year were derailed in part because of concerns about a potential review from CFIUS. Tsinghua Unigroup's $23 billion attempt to acquire Micron would have been the largest Chinese overseas takeover if it had gone through. In February, the company also backed out of a $3.78 billion deal to invest in disk drive maker Western Digital Corp., citing a decision by U.S. authorities to investigate the transaction on national security grounds.

CFIUS reviews cases when foreign entities buy control of a U.S. business, and the threshold for control could be a small minority stake, unless the acquirer is a passive investment fund.

The Treasury Department, which leads CFIUS, declines to comment on cases that may be before the committee, citing confidentiality rules.

U.S. officials have said they believe foreign companies are working in coordinated fashion to acquire strategic U.S. technology. People close to CFIUS have said officials are looking closely at the sale of semiconductor assets, which have been tightly monitored for decades.

Mr. Zhao said Tsinghua Unigroup may increase its stake or sell it based on Lattice's performance. He said he hasn't been in contact with Lattice executives, although he said he would be interested in other partnerships with the U.S. company.

Lattice representatives didn't immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.

It isn't the first time Chinese parties have taken interest in Lattice. In 2011, the Federal Bureau of Investigation charged two Chinese residents with setting up a fake company to circumvent U.S. export restrictions to purchase Lattice chips. In the indictment, prosecutors said that the two men sought to buy the military version of a Lattice chip that could be used for applications such as missile guidance and radar systems. The commercial version of the chip could be used for tasks like controlling mining equipment.

According to court records, those charges remain outstanding.

Lattice is a smaller provider of an expensive type of chip called a field-programmable gate array, or FPGA. Unlike regular microprocessors, which are hard-wired during manufacturing, FPGAs can be programmed by the end user. This niche chip market is dominated by two other U.S. companies: Altera Corp., which was acquired last year by Intel Corp., and Xilinx Inc.

The 2015 global market for FPGA chips was $4.4 billion according to data from Gartner.

Mr. Zhao said Tsinghua Unigroup aims to break ground next year in Shenzhen on a memory chip plant announced last year. Analysts have questioned how the Chinese company will move forward with the plant after the investment in Western Digital fell through, as Tsinghua Unigroup doesn't itself have the know-how to make memory chips.

Mr. Zhao said his company now has a team of 200 researchers to develop dynamic random access memory chips, after acquiring another Chinese chip maker, Tongfang Guoxin Electronics Co., last year. DRAM chips are widely used in personal computers.

The Lattice investment shows a strategic shift at Tsinghua Unigroup after several unsuccessful overseas acquisition attempts last year, said Mark Li, an analyst at Bernstein Research. The company is now taking a more cautious, longer-term approach to investment, he said.

"They are trying to be more careful, more discreet," Mr. Li said.

The global FPGA market is niche compared to other types of semiconductors like microprocessors and memory chips, but it commands high margins, he said.

William Mauldin, Robert McMillan and Kate O'Keeffe contributed to this article.

Write to Eva Dou at eva.dou@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 14, 2016 13:55 ET (17:55 GMT)

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