Marvell’s latest acquisition: switch-chip firm Innovium

• Innovium will be Marvell's fifth acquisition in four years  

Marvell is buying switch-chip maker, Innovium, for $1.1 billion to bolster its revenues from the lucrative data centre market.

Nariman Yousefi

The combination of Innovium with Inphi, Marvell’s most recent $10 billion acquisition, will enable the company to co-package optics alongside the high-bandwidth, low-latency switch chips.

“Inphi has quite a bit of experience shipping silicon photonics with the ColorZ and ColorZ II [modules],” says Nariman Yousefi, executive vice president, automotive, coherent DSP and switch group at Marvell. “And we have programmes inside the company to do co-packaged optics as well.”

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Marvell's first Inphi chips following its acquisition

Marvell unveiled three new devices at the recent OFC virtual conference and show.

One chip is its latest coherent digital signal processor (DSP), dubbed Deneb.

Nigel AlvaresThe other two chips, for use within the data centre, are a PAM-4 (4-level pulse-amplitude modulation) DSP, and a 1.6-terabit Ethernet physical layer device (PHY).

The chips are Marvell’s first announced Inphi products since it acquired the company in April.

Inphi’s acquisition adds $0.7 billion to Marvell’s $3 billion annual revenues while the more than 1,000 staff brings the total number of employees to 6,000.

Marvell spends 30 per cent of its revenues on R&D.

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