PETER DYKES MARVELL BRIEFING
IT’S ALL ABOUT CLOUD DATA CENTER INFRASTRUCTURE! INPHI BUY-OUT PUTS MARVELL IN PRIME POSITION Fresh from its acquisition of Inphi, Marvell has set out its priorities for the future, backing them up with multiple product launches at OFC. Optical Connections editor Peter Dykes talks to Nigel Alvares, Marvell’s vice president, Solutions Marketing, about the impact of the acquisition and the company’s stated aim to develop and deliver semiconductor solutions that move, store, process and secure the world’s data faster and more reliably than anyone else. M arvell acquired Inphi for an estimated 2018. After we got Cavium into the fold, we determined we needed custom ASIC solutions, so we acquired the former IBM ASIC semiconductor group, Avera Semi, which has a multi-decade track record of delivering complex, large custom ASIC networking and accelerator solutions. Then in 2019 we acquired Aquantia, a leading multi gigabyte PHY technology innovator. Although we were a leader in that space, we acquired them to give us greater scale and expertise to address our growing number of opportunities particularly in automotive. Then in 2021, we acquired Inphi to give us the high-speed electro-optics leadership, and now we have the industry’s most complete data infrastructure portfolio that uniquely positions us in this marketplace.
US$10 billion in stock and cash. Given that in Marvell’s 2021 fiscal year (its 2020 calendar year) the company’s revenues were around US$3 billion company revenue last year, a figure which rises with the Inphi acquisition to around US$3.7 billion, the increase, while not insignificant, could not be considered massive. The point being that this acquisition was less about revenue and more about expertise, with an eye on the future. Indeed, over the last three years, Marvell has been building its know-how with a series of acquisitions, having decided in 2016 that its future focus would be on data infrastructure. Nigel Alvares, Marvell’s vice president, Solutions Marketing told Optical Connections, “Marvell had core assets in storage and networking and we discovered that for us to be a data infrastructure leader, we needed a leading compute and security portfolio, and so we acquired Cavium in
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| ISSUE 24 | Q2 2021
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