Marvell Technology Stock

Marvell Technology, Inc., together with its consolidated subsidiaries, operates as a supplier of data infrastructure semiconductor solutions, spanning the data center core to network edge.

The company is a fabless semiconductor supplier of high-performance standard and semi-custom products with core strengths in developing and scaling complex System-on-a-Chip architectures, integrating analog, mixed-signal and digital signal processing functionality. Leveraging leading intellectual property and deep system-level expertise, as well as highly innovative security firmware, its solutions are empowering the data economy and enabling the data center, enterprise networking, carrier infrastructure, consumer, and automotive/industrial end markets.

The company also has operations in many countries, including Argentina, China, India, Israel, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam.

Markets and Products

The company’s product solutions serve five large end markets: data center, enterprise networking, carrier infrastructure, consumer, and automotive/industrial. These markets and their corresponding customer products and applications are as follows:

Data Center: Cloud and on-premise artificial intelligence (AI) systems; cloud and on-premise ethernet switching; cloud and on-premise network-attached storage (NAS); cloud and on-premise servers; cloud and on-premise storage area networks; cloud and on-premise storage systems; and data center interconnect (DCI).

Enterprise Networking: Campus and small medium enterprise routers; campus and small medium enterprise ethernet switches; campus and small medium enterprise wireless access points (WAPs); network appliances (firewalls, and load balancers); and workstations.

Carrier Infrastructure: Broadband access systems; ethernet switches; optical transport systems; routers; and wireless radio access network (RAN) systems.

Consumer: Broadband gateways and routers; gaming consoles; home data storage; home wireless access points (WAPs); personal computers (PCs); printers; and set-top boxes.

Automotive/Industrial: Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS); autonomous vehicles (av); in-vehicle networking; industrial ethernet switches; the United States military and government solutions; and video surveillance.

The company categorizes revenue from its five end markets by using a number of data points, including the type of customer purchasing the product, the function of the company’s product being sold, and the company’s knowledge of the end customer product or application into which the company’s product will be incorporated.

The company serves these five end markets with a broad portfolio of semiconductor solutions based on the company’s compute, networking, security, electro-optics, and storage technologies, which are essential and differentiating for these markets.

The company’s portfolio of solutions integrates multiple analog, mixed-signal and digital intellectual property components incorporating hardware, firmware and software technologies and the company’s system knowledge to provide the company’s customers highly-integrated solutions for their end products. In addition to selling standard product solutions, where the exact same product is sold to multiple customers, the company also offer optimized solutions which are customized to a specific customer’s requirements. The demand for optimized solutions has been increasing as the company’s customers seek greater customization and differentiation for their products and services.

The company’s current product offerings include custom Application Specific Integrated Circuits (‘ASICs’), electro-optics, ethernet solutions, fibre channel adapters, processors and storage controllers.

Custom ASICs

The company develops custom SoC (System-on-a-Chip) solutions tailored to individual customer specifications that deliver system-level differentiation for next-generation carrier, networking, data center, machine learning, automotive, aerospace and defense applications. These custom offerings leverage the company’s broad portfolio of technologies being used in the company’s standard products.

Electro-optics

The company offers a complete portfolio of high-speed optical communication semiconductor solutions for inside cloud data centers, between cloud data centers and in carrier networks. The company’s electro-optical products include PAM (pulse amplitude modulation) and coherent DSPs (digital signal processors), laser drivers, TIAs (trans-impedance amplifiers), silicon photonics and DCI (data center interconnect) solutions.

The company’s low-power and low-latency PAM DSPs implement equalization, estimation, clock recovery, carrier recovery, forward error correction, and coded modulation to enable ultra-fast data transmission speeds. In combination with the company’s drivers, TIAs and silicon photonics, the company’s suite of electro-optical products performs a wide range of functions such as amplifying, encoding, multiplexing, demultiplexing, and retiming signals at speeds beyond 800 Gbps. These products are key enablers for inter-connecting servers, routers, switches, storage and other infrastructure equipment that process, store and transport data traffic.

The company’s coherent TIAs, drivers and DSPs enable optical data transmission over distances of 100s to 1000s of kilometers in telecom carrier networks. The company’s PAM DSPs along with the company’s accompanying TIAs and drivers deliver low-power and cost-effective solutions for optical connectivity inside cloud data centers. The company’s data center interconnect solutions enable pluggable transceiver technology to directly interconnect regional cloud data centers, at lower cost, complexity and power compared to traditional optical transport solutions.

Ethernet Solutions

The company offers a broad portfolio of Ethernet solutions spanning controllers, network adapters, physical transceivers and switches. The company’s Ethernet solutions address a wide variety of end-customer data infrastructure products from small, high-reliability automotive sub-systems to large, high-performance modular enterprise and data center solutions.

The company’s Prestera and Teralynx Ethernet switches integrate market-optimized innovative features, such as advanced tunneling and routing, high throughput forwarding, and packet processing that make networks more effective at delivering content with low-latency and high-reliability. The company’s Ethernet switch product portfolio ranges from low-power, five-port switches to highly integrated, multi-terabit Ethernet devices that can be interconnected to form massive network solutions.

The company complements its Ethernet switches and infrastructure processors with a broad selection of Alaska Ethernet physical-layer transceivers for both optical and copper interconnects with advanced power management, link security, and time synchronization features.

The company’s Ethernet controllers and network adapters are optimized to accelerate and simplify data center and enterprise networking. The company’s family of products provide exceptional value features and performance enabling the most agile and data-intensive applications. They deliver Ethernet connectivity for enterprise-class workstations all the way up to enterprise and cloud data centers.

For the automotive market, the company offers an automotive-grade portfolio of Brightlane Ethernet physical-layer transceivers, bridges and switches supporting speeds from 100Mbps to 10Gbps with enhanced safety and security features required for today’s and tomorrow’s in-vehicle networks. The company’s Brightlane automotive Ethernet products provide the in-vehicle connectivity for key applications, such as advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), central gateways, body domain controllers, vehicle cameras, and in-vehicle infotainment.

Fibre Channel Products

The company’s QLogic Fibre Channel product family consists of host bus adapters (HBAs) and controllers for server and storage system connectivity. These products accelerate enterprise and data center applications, deliver a highly resilient infrastructure, enable greater server virtualization density along with an advanced set of data center diagnostic, orchestration and quality of service capabilities to optimize IT productivity. The company’s latest Fibre Channel products are well-suited for use with all-flash arrays by offering best-in-class latency and performance.

Processors

The company offers highly integrated semiconductors that provide single or multiple core processors, along with intelligent Layer 2 through 7 processing of the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) stack which is the framework that governs network communications within enterprise, datacenter, storage, and carrier markets. All of the company’s products are compatible with standards-based operating systems and general-purpose software to enable ease of programming, and are supported by the company’s ecosystem partners.

The company’s OCTEON data processor units (DPUs) and multi-core infrastructure processor families provide integrated Layer 4 through 7 data and security processing with additional capabilities at Layers 2 and 3 at line speeds. These software-compatible processors integrate next-generation networking I/Os along with advanced security, storage, and application hardware accelerators, offering programmability for the Layer 2 through Layer 7 processing requirements of intelligent networks. The OCTEON DPUs and processors are targeted for use in a wide variety of carrier, data center, and enterprise equipment, including routers, switches, security UTM appliances, content-aware switches, application-aware gateways, wireless access points, 3G/4G/5G wireless base stations, storage arrays, smart network interface controllers, network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) infrastructure.

The company’s OCTEON Fusion family of wireless baseband infrastructure processors is a highly scalable product family supporting enterprise small cells, high capacity outdoor picocells and microcells all the way up to multi-sector macrocells for multiple wireless protocols, including 5G. The key features include highly optimized processor cores, a highly efficient caching subsystem, high memory bandwidth digital signal processing engines along with a host of hardware accelerators. Additionally, multiple OCTEON Fusion chips can be cascaded for even denser deployments or higher order multiple-input and multiple-output, or MIMO. The company’s OCTEON Fusion processors have also been designed into 5G base station radio units to help enable Massive MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) antenna and advanced Beamforming implementations.

The company’s NITROX security processor family provides the functionality required for Layer 3 to Layer 5 secure communication in a single chip. These single chip, custom-designed processors provide security protocol processing, encryption, authentication and compression algorithms to reduce the load on the system processor and increase total system throughput. The LiquidSecurity product family is a high-performance hardware-based transaction security solution for cloud data center and enterprise applications. It addresses the high-performance security requirements for private key management and administration. This family is available as an adapter with complete software or as a standalone appliance.

The company’s LiquidIO Server Adapter family is a high-performance, general-purpose programmable adapter platform that enables cloud data centers and enterprises to offload their server processors for higher performance and power efficiencies. The LiquidIO Server Adapter family is supported by a feature rich software development kit that allows customers and partners to develop high-performance SDN (software defined networking) applications with packet processing, switching, security, tunneling, quality of service, and metering.

Storage Controllers

The company offers a broad portfolio of storage controllers for hard disk drives (‘HDDs’) and solid-state-drives (‘SSDs’) across all high-volume markets. The company’s Bravera controllers integrate several key Marvell technologies spanning compute, networking, security and storage. These key technologies enable the company’s controllers to be optimized performance-power solutions and to help the company’s customers high-efficient storage products. The company’s Bravera HDD controllers integrate Marvell’s industry-leading read channel technologies to enable higher volumetric densities at low power profiles and are being used by all the current HDD makers.

The company’s technology density and power differentiators are critical for addressing the fast-growing high-capacity, nearline HDD data center and enterprise markets. To further enhance the company’s Bravera HDD controller differentiation and value propositions, the company offers customers preamplifier products as part of a chipset with the company’s HDD controllers, seeking to increase the company’s customers’ product efficiencies. The company’s Bravera HDD controllers support all the high-volume host system interfaces, including Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (‘SATA’) and Serial Attached SCSI (‘SAS’), which are critical for the data center and enterprise markets.

The company’s Bravera SSD controller products leverage the company’s strong HDD controller know-how and system-level expertise. The company integrates several of its Bravera HDD controller IPs with the company’s flash technologies to deliver optimal solutions for data center, enterprise and client computing markets. The company’s Bravera SSD controller products integrate hardware and firmware components to help accelerate the company’s customers’ time to market and maximize the capabilities of the company’s solutions. Like its HDD controllers, the company’s SSD controllers support all the high-volume SSD host system interfaces, including SAS, SATA, peripheral component interconnect express (‘PCIe’), non-volatile memory express (‘NVMe’) and NVMe over Fabrics (‘NVMe-oF’).

The company’s new controller chipset products enable innovative flash-based storage architectures in data centers and enterprises. These solutions increase overall data center performance, density and scalability while lowering overall power, resulting in lower total cost of ownership for the infrastructure organizations.

Customers, Sales and Marketing

The company’s target customers are original equipment manufacturers (‘OEMs’) and original design manufacturers, both of which design and manufacture end market devices. The company seeks to strategically align its sales force along key customer lines in order to offer fully integrated platforms to the company’s customers. The company seeks to complement and support its direct sales force with manufacturers’ representatives for the company’s products in North America and Europe. In addition, the company has contracted with distributors who support the company’s sales and marketing activities in the United States, Europe and Asia. The company also uses third-party logistics providers who maintain warehouses in close proximity to the company’s customers’ facilities. The company expects that a significant percentage of the company’s sales will continue to come from direct sales to key customers.

The company uses field application engineers to provide technical support and assistance to existing and potential customers in designing, testing and qualifying systems designs that incorporate the company’s products. The company’s marketing team works in conjunction with the company’s field sales and application engineering force, and is organized around the company’s product groups.

Governmental Regulations

A portion of the business the company acquired in its Avera acquisition in 2021 requires facility security clearances under the National Industrial Security Program.

Environmental Management

The company is also subject to environmental rules and regulations in multiple jurisdictions, such as the EU Directive on Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS), the EU Regulation, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals SVHC Substances Directive, the EU Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE Directive), China’s regulation on Management Methods for Controlling Pollution Caused by Electronic Information Products, and California Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986.

The company’s products comply with the current Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive, the European legislation that restricts the use of a number of substances, including lead, and the Regulation, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals SVHC Substances Directive. In addition, each of the company’s manufacturing subcontractors certifies to the company compliance with ISO 14001:2004, the international standard related to environmental management. The company is also working to establish a ‘conflict-free’ supply chain, including ethical sourcing of certain minerals for the company’s products.

Intellectual Property

As of January 28, 2023, the company had over 10,000 issued patents and pending patent applications in the United States and other countries, covering various aspects of the company’s technology. The expiration of the company’s patents range from 2023 to 2042.

Competition

Companies that compete directly with the company’s businesses include, but are not limited to, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.(‘AMD’), Astera Labs, Inc., Broadcom Inc.(‘Broadcom’), Cisco Systems, Inc.(‘Cisco’), Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd, Intel Corporation, MACOM Technology Solutions Holdings, Inc., MediaTek Inc., Microchip Technology Inc., Montage Technology, Nvidia Corporation, NXP Semiconductors N.V., Phison Electronics Corporation, Qualcomm Incorporated (‘Qualcomm’), Rambus, Inc., Realtek Semiconductor Corporation, Semtech Corporation, Silicon Motion Technology Corporation, and Socionext Inc.

History

Marvell Technology, Inc. was founded in 1995. The company was incorporated in 1995.