Marvell Technology Group, Ltd. provides analog, mixed-signal, digital signal processing and embedded microprocessor integrated circuits.
The Company applies its technology to the high-speed, or broadband, communications market, where it provides physical layer transceivers, switched Ethernet and wireless solutions, which provide the interface between communications systems and data transmission media, to manufacturers of high-speed networking and wireless equipment, including Asustek, Cisco, 3Com, Dell, Foundry Networks, Intel and NETGEAR. The Company's wireless technology has various uses in emerging consumer electronic devices, including enabling applications, such as wireless connectivity, ad-hoc gaming, streaming audio or video and voice over Internet applications for products offered by companies such as Microsoft, Motorola, PalmOne and Sony Corporation.
Products
The Company's product portfolio consist storage, switching, transceivers, wireless, PC connectivity, gateways, communications controllers and power management products.
Storage Products
The Company offers a range of storage products for hard disk drive and tape drive electronics and storage interconnect technology. The company also developed first optical storage products for the DVD recorders to be used in computer applications.
Read Channel: A read channel is an integrated circuit that provides the interface between the analog signals stored on magnetic disk drives and the digital signals that computers can understand and manipulate. The performance of the read channel drives the performance of the overall storage system. The Company utilizes advanced mixed-signal and digital signal processing technologies in its array of partial response maximum likelihood, or PRML read channel products. The company’s read channel integrated circuits target specific feature and performance requirements of the enterprise, desktop and mobile computing markets.
System-On-Chip: The Company's integrated drive electronics platform is a flexible system-on-a-chip or SOC solution that provides increased performance, reduced power consumption and essential for next-generation hard disk drives. The Company's integrated SOC platform is designed to provide a solution for enterprise, desktop and mobile systems. Its SOC products incorporate the read channel, hard disk controller, embedded memory and one or more microprocessors into a single integrated circuit.
Hard Disk Controller: A hard disk controller, or HDC, is an integrated circuit that provides high performance interface input/output, or I/O, control for hard disk drives. The HDC consists of a buffer controller, integrated reduced instruction set computer, or RISC processors, a disk formatter, and an I/O interface. The Company offers HDC products with Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop, small computer systems interface, or SCSI, and serial architected SCSI, or SAS, I/O interfaces, which are integrated onto enterprise hard disk drives.
Preamplifier: A preamplifier is an integrated circuit that amplifies the low-level electrical signal transmitted to and from the recording heads in a disk drive device. Preamplifiers operate in two basic modes: read and write. In read mode, preamplifiers provide initial amplification of the high-bandwidth signal from the read head. In write mode, the preamplifier provides the write head with the high-frequency switched required for writing on the magnetic media.
The Company offers a line of preamplifier integrated circuits for enterprise, desktop and mobile storage systems. The Company's preamplifier products are designed to provide high-performance solutions for these market segments and are designed for use with magnetoresistance, or MR, giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, and tunneling magnetoresistance, or TMR, read/write heads.
Motor Controller: The motor controller integrated circuit is a driver that controls the amount of electrical current to the motors within the disk drive used to move the head stack and control drive speed.
Serial ATA: Serial ATA, or SATA, is the next generation internal storage interconnects designed to replace the existing ATA interface. SATA is the evolution of the ATA interface from a parallel bus to serial bus architecture. The SATA interface is optimized for internal primary storage and provides the capability for future enhancements. It has a transfer rate of 1.5 Gigabits per second (Gbps) and scalable to 3.0 Gbps and 6.0 Gbps.
Tape Drive Controllers: The Company's solutions provide its tape drive customers with SCSI, SAS and Fibre Channel I/O interfaces. These devices contain integrated RISC processors, buffer controller, direct memory access, or DMA, and a microprocessor interface.
Switching Products
The Company has a portfolio of switching solutions for the enterprise networking, carrier access and small office/home office (SOHO)/residential networking markets. Its switching products enable voice, video, and data traffic to be carried through the network with fidelity. The company enables the emergence of packet-based Internet communications of real-time traffic such as telephony and video-on-demand.
Prestera Switching Architecture: The Prestera architecture, the company's sixth generation of switching solutions, is designed to enable system manufacturers to build families of products that address high-density Gigabit solutions for the enterprise and Small and Medium Size Businesses (SMB) and terabit densities for Metro Area Networks (MANs). The Prestera-MX multi-layer switching family of products is fully integrated 10 Gigabit, One Gigabit and 100 megabit per second wire-speed configurable devices targeted at metropolitan edge and access systems in service provider networks. The Prestera-MX devices target MAN switching applications, including Layer 2/3 switching, Layer 2 to Layer 5 traffic classification for millions of flows, wire-speed access control lists, or ACLs, traffic policing and shaping, longest prefix match, network address translation, or NAT, and Multi-Protocol Label Switching, or MPLS, functions.
The Prestera-EX family is designed to provide a line of Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet and 10G switching solutions with 100% software compatibility. The Prestera-DX family of packet processors offers integration and performance targeted at desktop Gigabit Ethernet switches in small-to-midsize business, or SMB networks. The Prestera-FX family of fabric processors and crossbar switch fabrics offers expandability and scalability for Prestera packet processors. The fabric processors are single-chip traffic managers with an integrated crossbar and Serializer/Deserializer (SERDES) for high-performance scaling for stackable and chassis systems in data centers, multi-tenant buildings and enterprise wiring closets.
Link Street SOHO Multi-Port Integrated Switches: The Company's integrated 10/100 Link Street Fast Ethernet and Gigabit switch product family, which support 3 through 10 port configurations, provide solutions for the SOHO market. The Company's product offerings include a product family of multi-port Ethernet LAN Switches, targeting the SOHO LAN switching market. The SOHO switches with integrated transceivers incorporate features such as smart power management, and Virtual Cable Tester (VCT) technology, which performs cable diagnostics to reduce overall network support costs. These switches are targeted at applications such as switches, media converters, Internet Protocol, or IP phones, firewall appliances, wireless and wired gateway routers and wireless access points.
GalNet-2: The Company's GalNet-2 family comprises approximately 20 products, from Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet switch controllers, to G.Link crossbars and bridges. Applications for GalNet-2 devices span the range from SOHO products and rack systems supporting full-wire-speed performance, stacking and advanced features, to mini-chassis and full-chassis systems designed to provide enterprise users with full converged networking support. Systems using the GalNet-2 device use the company's proprietary G.Link bus to interconnect switch controllers and crossbar switch fabrics. Crossbars are used to route messaging and data between distributed switch controllers and, if present, the management CPU complex. The Company's G.Link crossbar switches range from 4 to 12 G.Link ports to support the development of various system architectures. GalNet-2 crossbars are also used with GalNet-2+ and GalNet-3 switched Ethernet controllers, for advanced Layer and Layer 3/4/5 system applications.
GalNet-2+: Utilizing the same architecture as the company's GalNet-2, its GalNet-2+ devices add integrated memory and support for advanced Quality of Service, or QoS, through support for packet prioritization. GalNet-2+ Ethernet controllers support the native QoS requirements of Windows 2000, which is providing an important catalyst for the development of multimedia applications. GalNet-2+ devices integrate both the packet and control memories into the switch controller, providing a high level of integration, low chip-count and advanced features. The GalNet-2+ switches are combined using GalNet-2 crossbars to enable the development of high-performance end products, such as 1U rack-mount stacking switches and modular systems with up to 256 Fast Ethernet ports or 32 Gigabit Ethernet ports.
GalNet-3: The Company's GalNet-3 family of converged voice/video/data network switch processors provides full-featured Layer 2/3/4/5 switch processors supporting the development of enterprise and edge routers, MAN switches and other communications applications requiring multimedia support and performance. The GalNet-3 products support advanced functions such as 5-quintuple flow classification, bandwidth reservation, rate policing and flow statistics gathering. The GalNet-3 switches support communications over Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet and OC-12c Packet-Over-Synchronous, or PoS.
Transceiver Products
The Company provides these transceivers to the enterprise networking and storage networking markets.
Alaska Gigabit Ethernet Transceivers: The Company's Alaska families of Gigabit Ethernet transceivers are designed to be solutions for enterprise networking systems where high performance and low power dissipation are absolutely necessary. Each product contains built-in 1.25 Gigabit SERDES function, which allows the device to work over either copper or fiber-optic cabling. The devices also support value-added features such as VCT technology, which is used to diagnose the attached cable plant. This technology can allow end-users to remotely analyze the quality and attributes of the cable, thereby avoiding unnecessary equipment returns and on-site service calls. Target applications include Network Interface Cards, LOMs, routers and next-generation switches.
Alaska X 10 Gigabit Ethernet Transceivers: The Company's Alaska X 10 Gigabit Ethernet and backplane transceiver products are designed to accelerate the deployment of 10 Gigabit capable systems for the LAN, MAN and WAN markets. The Alaska X transceiver family supports four or eight generations of SERDES technology from the company's single, dual and quad-port Alaska Gigabit Ethernet products.
Fast Ethernet Transceivers: The Company's physical layer products for the Fast Ethernet offers the lowest power dissipation, smallest form factor, and highest performance. The members of the Fast Ethernet PHY family offer very low power consumption of just 130 mWatts per port. The devices support other features such as VCT technology used to diagnose the attached cable plant.
Wireless Products
Libertas Wireless LAN Products: The Libertas family of chipsets represents the company's wireless Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, 802.11 solution for the SOHO/residential, enterprise networking and consumer electronics markets. The Company's 802.11 solutions offer integration for WLAN users who demand 54 Mbps and above wireless connectivity. The Libertas product line offers a complete family of WLAN solutions. These products range from client adapter cards to home gateways to power efficient products for emerging consumer applications.
WLAN products are specifically developed for emerging consumer applications. These solutions integrate Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and IP network processing to enable the device to perform ad-hoc wireless connections to other wireless devices, enabling such applications such as peer to peer printing, ad-hoc gaming, streaming audio and video and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications.
VoIP Products
VoIP Products: The Company's family of integrated VoIP solutions is targeted at the rapidly growing, Internet voice communications market. The VoIP product has been designed specifically for ultra-low power Voice over WLAN (VoWLAN) handsets with other members of its WLAN solutions targeted at VoIP residential gateways. These products integrate VoIP processing, low power wireless Internet access, or WiFi, circuitry, a high-performance host CPU and peripherals into single SoC solutions. The company is enabling a new class of applications for the home, such as instant messaging service across cordless handsets. And, by allowing voice to integrate with data, VoWLAN is available for volume use.
Orion Product
Orion Product: The Orion product family is designed to enable media vault platforms that allow users to instantly access rich multimedia and data content throughout the home. The Orion product family powers a range of media vault platforms, each capable of delivering simultaneous streams of rich, multimedia content across wired and wireless networks. The scalable storage, networking and smart media processing architecture of Orion is designed to provide a price/performance advantage over other solutions and to be a key component in markets such as home storage appliances, integrated storage appliances, such as access points and digital video recorders and next generation broadband service provider products.
The company has integrated an ARM compliant processor core to improve performance and provide extra processing speed for additional applications. This family of VoIP products also offers AutoLink, a one-click solution for setting up, configuring and enabling a secure WPA or WPA2 wireless network.
PC Connectivity Products
PC Connectivity Products: The Company's PC connectivity products consist of the Yukon Gigabit Ethernet controllers, which were designed for volume deployment of Gigabit PC connections. The Yukon family of single-chip desktop and server network connectivity solutions offers integration of the company's Alaska Gigabit PHY and Media Access Controller, or MAC, technology with a software suite. The Yukon devices are offered in an ultra-small form factor with low-power requirements, and are targeted for client and server network interface cards, or NIC, and LAN-on-Motherboard, or LOM, applications for traditional peripheral connect interface, or PCI, bus and PCI-Express architectures.
Gateway Products
LinkStreet Gateway Products: The Company's Link Street family of highly integrated gateway router devices is designed for business, SOHO and residential gateway solutions. The Link Street SOHO gateways provide a full-wire-speed 100 Mbps integrated gateway router solution by integrating a reduced instruction set computer central processing unit, or RISC CPU, core plus a multi-port Fast Ethernet switch and Fast Ethernet PHYs into a single mixed-signal integrated chip solution. New firewall capabilities are designed to allow the Link Street gateways to isolate and protect WAN/LAN networks from virus intrusion.
Communications Controller Products
The Company has an offering of integrated system and communication controllers. These devices can be combined with embedded RISC microprocessors to form complete MIPS and PowerPC CPU-based communication systems. The Company's controllers are used in a range of applications, including routers, switches, digital subscriber line access multiplexers, access concentrators, wireless base stations, VoIP gateways and storage area networks.
Discovery System Controllers: The Company provides Discovery system controllers for MIPS and PowerPC CPU-based communication systems. The Company's controllers are used in systems developed by OEMs for the Internet infrastructure. These include switches, LAN to WAN edge routers, enterprise routers, access concentrators, telecom equipment and laser printers. The Company's integrated system controllers can be combined with the embedded RISC microprocessors to form complete CPU subsystems. The Company's system controllers contain all of the key control blocks needed to build high-performance 32-bit and 64-bit CPU subsystems, including a DRAM controller, a peripheral device controller, direct memory access engines, timers, PCI interfaces and interrupt controllers.
Horizon WAN Communication Controllers: The Company's Horizon family of advanced communications controllers provides all of the required network interfaces that bridge the LAN with the Internet infrastructure and combines most of the common functions found in multi-service access routers into a single chip. These devices target the core of next-generation multi-service edge routers and remote access equipment that merge the functions of LAN-to-WAN routers, VoIP gateways, network security equipment and remote access concentrators. The Company's Horizon system controllers provide new packet processing capabilities for systems that require the convergence of voice, video and data at the edge of the network. The integrated NetGX coprocessor can handle compute-intensive tasks such as flow-classification based on layer 3-5 packet information, encryption and authentication for security purposes and virtually any other packet processing function typically handled by the host CPU. The NetGX coprocessor can free processing power so that the CPU can run multi-service applications such as managing virtual private networks, firewalls and integrated voice services.
Power Management Products
DSP Switcher Integrated Regulators: DSP Switcher integrated regulators are designed to provide efficiency, precision and transient response together with small solution size to provide system designers with improved form factor and battery life in portable equipment. Integration of power MOSFETs (metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor), internal frequency compensation and single resistor output programming reduces design efforts.
DSP Switcher Integrated Regulator Modules: DSP Switcher integrated regulator modules provide plug-and-play implementations of the company's switching regulator integrated circuits in convenient, modular form factors. The Company offers single in-line package, dual in-line package, or surface mount technology form factors that can be combined with a single programming resistor to set the desired output voltage.
The company’s Aricent Intelligent Switch Solution advanced switching and routing system is being ported to the Marvell Prestera and Link Street Ethernet switches. The combined Marvell/Aricent solution is a platform for Layer 2 switching that provides quality of service and management capabilities, accelerating time-to-market for OEM designs. The Marvell famil y of switching solutions is designed to meet the demands of high-performance networks, and provide the reliability and resiliency necessary for business continuity. Its solutions provide advanced security to protect data, network users, and the network infrastructure, as well as robust quality of service for IP applications including voice, video, and mission critical data services.
Acquisition
In November 2005, the Company acquired the hard disk and tape drive controller semiconductor business of QLogic Corporation. The acquired business designs and supplies controller chips for data storage peripherals, such as hard disk and tape drives.
Collaboration
Marvell Technology Group, Ltd. and EZchip Technologies, Ltd. have entered into collaboration to jointly develop, market and sell network processor unit (NPU) solutions for the Ethernet market. EZchip develops high-speed network processors. Marvell develops storage, communications, and consumer silicon solutions.
Markets
The Company's product offerings are primarily targeted at three markets: business enterprise, consumer and emerging markets. The company targets computers, communications-related equipment and consumer devices that require integrated circuit devices for high-speed data storage, transmission, and management. The Company offers its customers in these markets a range of integrated circuit solutions using proprietary Communications Mixed-Signal Processing (CMSP), and digital signal processing technologies.
Sales and Marketing
The company operates primarily in North America, Europe and Asia. The Company’s sales office are located in Singapore, Bermuda, China, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Customers
The Company's principal customers include Wintech Microelectronics, Western Digital; Samsung; Toshiba; Fujitsu; and Intel.
Competition
The Company's competitors for its read channels and storage SOCs are Agere Systems and STMicroelectronics. The Company's competitors for preamplifiers and motor controllers are Agere Systems and Texas Instruments. For transceivers products, the company competes with Agere Systems, Broadcom, Intel, National Semiconductor, Realtek Semiconductor and Vitesse Semiconductor. The Company's switching products compete against Broadcom, Intel and Vitesse. In the market for system controllers, the company's competitors include Tundra and PLX Technology, and its WAN communications controllers compete directly with products from companies such as Freescale Semiconductor and PMC-Sierra. In the wireless LAN market, the company's competitors include Agere Systems, Atheros, Broadcom, Conexant, Intel and Texas Instruments. For the company's power management products it competes with various companies, including Analog Devices, International Rectifier, Intersil Corporation, Linear Technology, Maxim Integrated Products Incorporated, National Semiconductor, Texas Instruments and Volterra Semiconductor. The Company's VoIP solutions compete primarily against Texas Instruments and Broadcom.
History
Marvell Technology Group, Ltd. was incorporated in 1995.
