Marvell Technology, Inc. is an American company, headquartered in Santa Clara, California, which develops and produces semiconductors and related technology. Founded in 1995, the company had more than 7,000 employees as of 2023, with over 10,000 patents worldwide, and an annual revenue of $5.9 billion for fiscal 2023.
History
Marvell was founded in 1995 by Dr. Sehat Sutardja, his wife Weili Dai, and his brother Pantas Sutardja. They worked on designing a CMOS-based read channel for disk drives as their first product. Seagate Technology became their first customer. The initial public offering on June 27, 2000 (near the end of the dot-com bubble) raised $90 million.
In April 2016, CEO Sehat Sutardja and President Weili Dai were ousted from their posts after activist investor Starboard Value fund took a roughly 7 percent stake in the company.
In July 2016, Marvell appointed Matt Murphy as its new President and CEO.
On July 6, 2018, Marvell completed its acquisition of Cavium, Inc. On the same day, it announced the appointment of Syed Ali (co-founder of Cavium, Inc., and previously the company's president and CEO), Brad Buss (director of Cavium, Inc.) and Edward Frank (director of Cavium, Inc.) to the Marvell Board of Directors.
In September 2019, Marvell completed the acquisition of Aquantia Corp.
In April 2021, Marvell completed the acquisition of Inphi Corporation. As part of the acquisition, Marvell reorganized so that the combined company is domiciled in Wilmington, Delaware.
In September 2023, Marvell Technologies acquired an expansion deal in Pune, India.
Acquisitions
Through the years, Marvell acquired smaller companies to enter new markets.
Products
Compute
Data Processing Unit
Marvell OCTEON and ARMADA DPUs which integrate a CPU, network interfaces and programmable data acceleration engines on a specialized electronic circuit.
Custom
Marvell also offered Customer Specific Standard Product (CSSP), where customer accelerators and interefaces could be integrated directly into Marvell's Octeon processors. Following Marvell's 2019 acquisition of Avera Semiconductor (formerly the custom ASIC division of GlobalFoundries and prior to that of IBM), Marvell offers custom ASIC tailored to clients' specific design goals. And it provides services for ASICs development to the Aerospace and Defense industries through its independent subsidiary Marvell Government Solutions (MGS). In a joint venture with TSMC, Marvell introduced a 3nm product.
Infrastructure Processors
On November 12, 2019, Marvell announced that their ThunderX2 SoCs have been deployed on Microsoft Azure. On March 2, 2020, Marvell announced OCTEON Fusion and OCTEON TX2 5G infrastructure processors, as well as deals to provide processors for 5G Infrastructure for Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson, ZTE, and Samsung. On March 16, 2020, Marvell announced ThunderX3 and their plan for ThunderX4 in 2022. On August 28, 2020, Marvell announced plan to refocus their ThunderX Server Teams to their Custom Silicon Business.
Security Solutions
Marvell's security-related products include their LiquidSecurity HSM Adapters and NITROX Cryptographic Offload Engines.
Networking and Storage
Marvell's networking products include their FastLinQ Ethernet network adapters and controllers, Ethernet Switches, Ethernet PHYs and Automotive Ethernet.
Marvell's products include SSD Controllers, HDD Controllers, HDD Preamplifiers, Storage Accelerators, and QLogic Fibre Channel Adapters and Controllers. On May 27, 2021, Marvell announced its first NVM Express SSD controllers to support PCI Express 5.0.
Other products
Marvell supplied the Wi-Fi chip for the original (first-generation) Apple iPhone. Marvell Mobile Hotspot (MMH) is an in-car Wi-Fi connectivity. The 2010 Audi A8 was the first automobile in the market to feature a factory-installed MMH.
Google's Chromecast products are powered by Marvell SoCs. Namely the Marvell ARMADA 1500 Mini SoC (88DE3005) for the Chromecast 1st gen and Marvell ARMADA 1500 Mini Plus SoC (88DE3006) for the Chromecast 2nd gen & Chromecast audio. Synaptics acquired Marvell Multimedia Solutions on 2017-06-12 ARMADA 1500 SoC's are now produced under different names