By Sandy Rodriguez, Corporate Staff Professional, Philanthropy, Marvell
Marvell is excited to be named “Fittest Firm” in the annual Silicon Valley Turkey Trot for the eighth consecutive year. Since 2016, Marvell has sponsored the Fittest Firm Competition and earned this title with the largest number of employee registrants in the largest firm category.
The biggest Thanksgiving Day race in America, the Silicon Valley Turkey Trot draws thousands of runners, joggers, and walkers to join in healthy activities on the holiday while contributing to the less fortunate in our community. Marvell had a total of 894 employees participate in the Turkey Trot this year. Since its inception in 2005, the event has donated $11.2 million and collected over 250,000 pounds of food for several local charities.
By Mary Gorges, Content Manager, Talent Branding, Marvell
At Marvell, we strive to create a culture of inclusion and belonging, where everyone feels welcomed, can share different perspectives, and work together to achieve a common goal. Veterans Day on Saturday, November 11 is an opportunity in the U.S. to honor the brave individuals who have selflessly served our country and to express our deep gratitude for their dedication and sacrifice.
In recognition of Veterans Day, let’s hear from military veteran Joseph Goodearly, who’s been at Marvell for 18 years in our Storage business. He shares his perspective on what this day means for him and the military lessons he learned that have helped him in his post-military career.
Join us in celebrating and honoring the contributions of our veterans and those currently serving in active duty around the world.
Here at Marvell, we talk frequently to our customers and end users about I/O technology and connectivity. This includes presentations on I/O connectivity at various industry events and delivering training to our OEMs and their channel partners. Often, when discussing the latest innovations in Fibre Channel, audience questions will center around how relevant Fibre Channel (FC) technology is in today’s enterprise data center. This is understandable as there are many in the industry who have been proclaiming the demise of Fibre Channel for several years. However, these claims are often very misguided due to a lack of understanding about the key attributes of FC technology that continue to make it the gold standard for use in mission-critical application environments.
From inception several decades ago, and still today, FC technology is designed to do one thing, and one thing only: provide secure, high-performance, and high-reliability server-to-storage connectivity. While the Fibre Channel industry is made up of a select few vendors, the industry has continued to invest and innovate around how FC products are designed and deployed. This isn’t just limited to doubling bandwidth every couple of years but also includes innovations that improve reliability, manageability, and security.
By Mary Gorges, Talent Recruitment Content Lead, Marvell
Women increasingly look beyond their own teams for advocacy and help to step into leadership roles and activities beyond their day-to-day jobs.
Inclusion networks are a way for many companies to allow any employee to raise their hand and try on new roles. At Marvell, Women@Marvell is our first-ever inclusion network, or what many refer to as an Employee Resource Group (ERG). But why women first?
“At Marvell, we are focused on elevating the lives and careers of women, not only in our company, but in the broader industry and the communities where we live and work. Women are largely under-represented in the semiconductor industry and are a hidden wealth of innovation and leadership. Launching our women’s inclusion network is just one small step toward helping women thrive,” noted Janice Hall, EVP and Chief Human Resources Officer and Women@Marvell executive sponsor.
Women@Marvell saw 500 women and men join in its first week. It offers mentoring, meaningful conversations, support and ideas to help members actively seek development opportunities. Leaders often share their influence and open doors, and members help each other find their way in more challenging times of their careers, such as becoming a first-time mother.
By Kristin Hehir, Senior Manager, PR and Marketing, Marvell
The sheer volume of data traffic moving across networks daily is mind-boggling almost any way you look at it. During the past decade, global internet traffic grew by approximately 20x, according to the International Energy Agency. One contributing factor to this growth is the popularity of mobile devices and applications: Smartphone users spend an average of 5 hours a day, or nearly 1/3 of their time awake, on their devices, up from three hours just a few years ago. The result is incredible amounts of data in the cloud that need to be processed and moved. Around 70% of data traffic is east-west traffic, or the data traffic inside data centers. Generative AI, and the exponential growth in the size of data sets needed to feed AI, will invariably continue to push the curb upward.
Yet, for more than a decade, total power consumption has stayed relatively flat thanks to innovations in storage, processing, networking and optical technology for data infrastructure. The debut of PAM4 digital signal processors (DSPs) for accelerating traffic inside data centers and coherent DSPs for pluggable modules have played a large, but often quiet, role in paving the way for growth while reducing cost and power per bit.
Marvell at ECOC 2023
At Marvell, we’ve been gratified to see these technologies get more attention. At the recent European Conference on Optical Communication, Dr. Loi Nguyen, EVP and GM of Optical at Marvell, talked with Lightwave editor in chief, Sean Buckley, on how Marvell 800 Gbps and 1.6 Tbps technologies will enable AI to scale.
Communities around the world are debating this question as they try to balance the plans of service providers and the concerns of residents.
Last year, the Greater London Authority told real estate developers that new housing projects in West London may not be able to go forward until 2035 because data centers have taken all of the excess grid capacity1. EirGrid2 said it won’t accept new data center applications until 2028. Beijing3 and Amsterdam have placed strict limits on new facilities. Cities in the southwest and elsewhere4, meanwhile, are increasingly worried about water consumption as mega-sized data centers can use over 1 million gallons a day5.
When you add in the additional computing cycles needed for AI and applications like ChatGPT, the outline of the conflict becomes more heated.
On the other hand, we know we can’t live without them. Modern society, with remote work, digital streaming and modern communications all depend on data centers. Data centers are also one of sustainability’s biggest success stories. Although workloads grew by approximately 10x in the last decade with the rise of SaaS and streaming, total power consumption stayed almost flat at around 1% to 1.5%6 of worldwide electricity thanks to technology advances, workload consolidation, and new facility designs. Try and name another industry that increased output by 10x with a relatively fixed energy diet?
By Loi Nguyen, Executive Vice President, Cloud Optics Business Group, Marvell
Some twenty years ago the concept of IP over Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) was proposed as a way to simplify the optical infrastructures. In this vision, all optical networks are connected via point-to-point mesh networks with a router at the center. The concept was elegant, but never took off because the optical technology at the time was not able to keep up with the faster innovation cycle of CMOS, driven by Moore’s law. The larger form factor of WDM optics does not allow them to be directly plugged into a router port. Adopting a larger form factor on the router in order to implement IP over WDM in a massive scale would be prohibitively expensive.
For routers to interface with the networks, a “transponder” is needed, which is connected to a router via short-reach optics on one side and WDM optics to the network on the other. The market for transponders grew quickly to become a multi-billion-dollar market.
A Star is Born
About 10 years ago, I was building a team at Inphi, where I was a co-founder, to further develop a nascent technology called silicon photonics. SiPho, as it’s called, leverages commercial CMOS foundries to develop photonics integrated circuits (PIC) that integrate hundreds of components ranging from high-speed modulators and detectors to passive devices such as couplers, waveguides, monitoring diodes, attenuators and so on. We were looking for ideas and customers to bring silicon photonics to the marketplace.
Fortunately, good technology and market need found one another. A group of Microsoft executives had been considering IP over WDM to launch a new concept of “distributed data centers,” in which multiple data centers in a region are connected by high speed WDM optics using the same form factor as shorter reach “client optics” used in switches and routers. By chance, we met at ECOC 2013 in London for the initial discussion, and then some months later, a product that enabled IP over WDM at cloud scale was born.
Employees have demonstrated remarkable resiliency over the past few years, adjusting to new ways of working during an unprecedented global crisis. It forever changed how employees think about their workplaces, careers, and personal lives, giving them new perspectives on what really matters.
As a company, Marvell has also been evolving, tapping into employee experiences, and listening intently to their opinions on what makes Marvell a great place to work and how we can continuously improve. We were pleased to consistently hear appreciation for being able to experiment with cutting-edge technology, develop skills, and build products that help connect people all over the world.
But another pattern took shape in their commentary as they emphasized the importance of teammates and leaders, uttering words like transparency, integrity, and respect. We believe these adjectives are no coincidence. They are interrelated characteristics Marvell has purposefully cultivated to help employees thrive.
By Raghib Hussain, President, Products and Technologies, Marvell
To our Valued Customers:
Recently, reports have surfaced alleging that certain Cavium products included a “backdoor” for the National Security Agency (NSA). We assure you that neither Cavium nor Marvell have ever knowingly incorporated or retained any vulnerability or backdoor in our products.
Our products implement a suite of standards-based security algorithms like AES, 3DES, SHA etc. Prior to 2014, some of our software libraries included an algorithm for random number generation called Dual_EC_DRGB. This algorithm was one of four officially recommended at the time by the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) that our products implemented. In 2013, this algorithm was reported by the New York Times, The Guardian, and ProPublica to include a backdoor for the NSA. After we learned of the potential issue, Cavium removed this algorithm from its software libraries and has not included it in any product shipped since then.
Importantly, the Dual_EC_DRGB algorithm was included in some of Cavium’s software libraries for our chip-level products, but not in the chips themselves. As a result, while Cavium provided this algorithm (among many), the ultimate choice and control over the algorithms being used was managed by the equipment vendors integrating our products into their system level products. Many companies, not just Cavium, implemented the NIST standard algorithms including this algorithm. In fact, according to NIST’s historical validation data, approximately 80 different products with semiconductors from different vendors implemented this algorithm in some combination of hardware, software, and firmware before it was removed.
By Samuel Liu, Senior Director, Product Line Management, Marvell
Digital technology has what you could call a real estate problem. Hyperscale data centers now regularly exceed 100,000 square feet in size. Cloud service providers plan to build 50 to 100 edge data centers a year and distributed applications like ChatGPT are further fueling a growth of data traffic between facilities. Similarly, this explosive surge in traffic also means telecommunications carriers need to upgrade their wired and wireless networks, a complex and costly undertaking that will involve new equipment deployment in cities all over the world.
Weaving all of these geographically dispersed facilities into a fast, efficient, scalable and economical infrastructure is now one of the dominant issues for our industry.
Pluggable modules based on coherent digital signal processors (CDSPs) debuted in the last decade to replace transponders and other equipment used to generate DWDM compatible optical signals. These initial modular products didn’t offer the same performance as the incumbent solutions, and could only be deployed in limited use cases. These early modules, with their large form factors, had performance limitations and did not support the required high-density data transmission. Over time, advances in technology optimized the performance of pluggable modules, and CDSP speeds grew from 100 to 200 and 400 Gbps. Continued innovation, and the development of an open ecosystem, helped expand the potential applications.
We take pride in creating cutting-edge technology, but what truly stands out about the employee experience at Marvell is that our people have the freedom to take on compelling challenges and find new ways forward while continuously advancing their expertise. The idea of ownership is central to who we are, and it is the cornerstone of how Marvell operates. Every day, our employees take ownership by improving execution, fueling collaboration, and shaping outcomes. They solve problems and ignite breakthroughs, proving that the impossible isn’t. And they own what’s next–for themselves and their teams, for Marvell, and for the customers and industries built on our innovation.
Watch the video to hear from our team members around the world as they speak in their own words about what ownership means to them.
I’m thrilled to announce that we published our second annual Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) report today. I’m proud to share the progress we have made across the company. ESG intersects with all parts of the business, so it really is a team effort. This past year, everyone stepped up to improve performance in their key areas and launch new initiatives that strengthen Marvell’s business and impact.
The report provides the latest updates toward meeting our goals during fiscal year 2023. For instance, we submitted a Science Based Target for external validation, carried out a climate scenario analysis, conducted a human rights impact assessment (ahead of schedule), and maintained an employee satisfaction score above the industry benchmark.
By Janice Hall, Executive Vice President, Chief Human Resources Officer, Marvell
At Marvell, we are focused on elevating the lives and careers of women, not only in our company, but in the broader industry and the communities where we live and work. One way we do this is through the women’s inclusion network, Women@Marvell, where I am proud to be its executive sponsor. We recently held a special company-wide event that celebrated our women and highlighted the need for support from our advocates. At this event, we gathered the regional leaders of Women@Marvell for a panel discussion focused on some of the challenges that women still face as professionals in the semiconductor industry, and what we can do to help propel women forward. I was inspired to hear the personal stories and shared experiences from our women leaders around the world.
By Kristin Hehir, Senior Manager, PR and Marketing, Marvell
Marvell and Memblaze were honored with the “Most Innovative Customer Implementation” award at the Flash Memory Summit (FMS), the industry’s largest conference featuring flash memory and other high-speed memory technologies, last week.Powered by the Marvell® Bravera™ SC5 controller, Memblaze developed the PBlaze 7 7940 GEN5 SSD family, delivering an impressive 2.5 times the performance and 1.5 times the power efficiency compared to conventional PCIe 4.0 SSDs and ~55/9us read/write latency1. This makes the SSD ideal for business-critical applications and high-performance workloads like machine learning and cloud computing. In addition, Memblaze utilized the innovative sustainability features of Marvell’s Bravera SC5 controllers for greater resource efficiency, reduced environmental impact and streamlined development efforts and inventory management.
There's a certain energy new employees bring to the workplace. Everything about starting a job is fresh and exciting: colleagues, offices, policies. The pressure to perform and succeed in an unfamiliar environment can also be intense.
At Marvell, we're going all in on the potential of our early career talent. We believe their perspectives can help drive success from day one. This is why hands-on learning and mentorship are embraced at all levels of the organization.
Marvell is excited to announce that we’ve joined the automotive chiplet initiative coordinated by imec, a world-leading research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies. Imec has formed an informal ecosystem of leading companies from multiple automotive industry segments to address the challenge of bringing multi-chiplet compute modules to the automotive market.
The goal of imec’s automotive chiplet initiative is to address the design challenges that arise from ever-increasing data movement, processing, storage and security requirements. These demands complicate the automotive manufacturers’ desire for scalable performance to address different vehicle classes, while reducing costs and development time and ensuring consistent quality, reliability and safety.
And these demands will be made even more intense by the coming era of super-human sensing. The fusion of data from multi-spectral cameras (visible and infrared), radar and LiDAR will enable “vision” beyond human capability. Such sensor fusion will be a critical requirement for safe autonomous driving.
Thousands of team members from around the world all have a hand in designing innovative semiconductor technology that moves, stores, processes and secures the world’s data. What keeps this ever-evolving global organization grounded and in sync? It’s our people and how they uphold our core behaviors: act with integrity and treat everyone with respect; execute with thoroughness and rigor; innovate to solve customer needs; and help others achieve their objectives. These behaviors shape our belief that how we do things is just as important as what we do, and they guide all of our interactions – both with each other and with our partners and customers. To illustrate how these behaviors come to life, let’s hear from Marvell employees directly.
By Suhas Nayak, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing, Marvell
In the world of artificial intelligence (AI), where compute performance often steals the spotlight, there's an unsung hero working tirelessly behind the scenes. It's something that connects the dots and propels AI platforms to new frontiers. Welcome to the realm of optical connectivity, where data transfer becomes lightning-fast and AI's true potential is unleashed. But wait, before you dismiss the idea of optical connectivity as just another technical detail, let's pause and reflect. Think about it: every breakthrough in AI, every mind-bending innovation, is built on the shoulders of data—massive amounts of it. And to keep up with the insatiable appetite of AI workloads, we need more than just raw compute power. We need a seamless, high-speed highway that allows data to flow freely, powering AI platforms to conquer new challenges.
In this post, I’ll explain the importance of optical connectivity, particularly the role of DSP-based optical connectivity, in driving scalable AI platforms in the cloud. So, buckle up, get ready to embark on a journey where we unlock the true power of AI together.
While Fibre Channel (FC) has been around for a couple of decades now, the Fibre Channel industry continues to develop the technology in ways that keep it in the forefront of the data center for shared storage connectivity. Always a reliable technology, continued innovations in performance, security and manageability have made Fibre Channel I/O the go-to connectivity option for business-critical applications that leverage the most advanced shared storage arrays.
A recent development that highlights the progress and significance of Fibre Channel is Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) recent announcement of their latest offering in their Storage as a Service (SaaS) lineup with 32Gb Fibre Channel connectivity. HPE GreenLake for Block Storage MP powered by HPE Alletra Storage MP hardware features a next-generation platform connected to the storage area network (SAN) using either traditional SCSI-based FC or NVMe over FC connectivity. This innovative solution not only provides customers with highly scalable capabilities but also delivers cloud-like management, allowing HPE customers to consume block storage any way they desire – own and manage, outsource management, or consume on demand.HPE GreenLake for Block Storage powered by Alletra Storage MP
At launch, HPE is providing FC connectivity for this storage system to the host servers and supporting both FC-SCSI and native FC-NVMe. HPE plans to provide additional connectivity options in the future, but the fact they prioritized FC connectivity speaks volumes of the customer demand for mature, reliable, and low latency FC technology.
By Michael Kanellos, Head of Influencer Relations, Marvell
AI’s growth is unprecedented from any angle you look at it. The size of large training models is growing 10x per year. ChatGPT’s 173 million plus users are turning to the website an estimated 60 million times a day (compared to zero the year before.). And daily, people are coming up with new applications and use cases.
As a result, cloud service providers and others will have to transform their infrastructures in similarly dramatic ways to keep up, says Chris Koopmans, Chief Operations Officer at Marvell in conversation with Futurum’s Daniel Newman during the Six Five Summit on June 8, 2023.
“We are at the beginning of at least a decade-long trend and a tectonic shift in how data centers are architected and how data centers are built,” he said.
The transformation is already underway. AI training, and a growing percentage of cloud-based inference, has already shifted from running on two-socket servers based around general processors to systems containing eight more GPUs or TPUs optimized to solve a smaller set of problems more quickly and efficiently.
ChatGPT has fired the world’s imagination about AI. The chatbot can write essays, compose music, and even converse in different languages. If you’ve read any ChatGPT poetry, you can see it doesn’t pass the Turing Test yet, but it’s a huge leap forward from what even experts expected from AI just three months ago. Over one million people became users in the first five days, shattering records for technology adoption.
The groundswell also strengthens arguments that AI will have an outsized impact on how we live—with some predicting AI will contribute significantly to global GDP by 2030 by fine-tuning manufacturing, retail, healthcare, financial systems, security, and other daily processes.
But the sudden success also shines light on AI’s most urgent problem: our computing infrastructure isn’t built to handle the workloads AI will throw at it. The size of AI networks grew by 10x per year over the last 5 years. By 2027 one in five Ethernet switch ports in data centers will be dedicated to AI, ML and accelerated computing.
Great news! Marvell is excited to share that the company has been recognized in the Best Places to Work 2023 largest company category at the annual awards program produced by the San Francisco Business Times and Silicon Valley Business Journal. Marvell’s inclusion on the annual list was determined by survey results provided voluntarily by company employees.
“This recognition reflects our focus on cultivating and continuously nurturing a culture where wellness and inclusivity are prioritized,” said Janice Hall, executive vice president, chief human resources officer at Marvell. “We have an incredible, diverse team at Marvell and I’m very proud of our commitment to creating an environment where everyone is supported to do work that matters, while given the opportunity to take ownership of their careers.”
Marvell is committed to being a good steward of the environment and we are excited to mark the 2023 Earth Day on April 22 with a week-long celebration. Our employees care about protecting our planet and want to do their part both at work and beyond.
We look forward to engaging our employees in virtual and in-person events throughout the week to enable them to better protect the environment, such as:
The Big 6 Sustainability Webinar:
We are kicking off the week with a global webinar with special guest speakers from Carbonauts, a company that teaches people how to reduce their carbon footprints and integrate sustainability into their day-to-day lives. Employees will learn the six biggest levers for reducing their carbon footprints. Carbonauts is a frequent guest at sustainability conferences and podcasts and the company’s clients include many Fortune 500 companies like Amazon, Chanel, Toyota, AT&T, Warner Brothers, and Netflix, to name a few. Carbonauts is on a mission to get society to the tipping point of behavior change to make sustainable living a way of life for all.
By Bill Hagerstrand, Security Solutions BU, Marvell
New Challenges and Solutions in an Open, Disaggregated Cloud-Native World
Time to grab a cup of coffee, as I describe how the transition towards open, disaggregated, and virtualized networks – also known as cloud-native 5G – has created new challenges in an already-heightened 4G-5G security environment.
5G networks move, process and store an ever-increasing amount of sensitive data as a result of faster connection speeds, mission-critical nature of new enterprise, industrial and edge computing/AI applications, and the proliferation of 5G-connected IoT devices and data centers. At the same time, evolving architectures are creating new security threat vectors. The opening of the 5G network edge is driven by O-RAN standards, which disaggregates the radio units (RU), front-haul, mid-haul, and distributed units (DU). Virtualization of the 5G network further disaggregates hardware and software and introduces commodity servers with open-source software running in virtual machines (VM’s) or containers from the DU to the core network.
As a result, these factors have necessitated improvements in 5G security standards that include additional protocols and new security features. But these measures alone, are not enough to secure the 5G network in the cloud-native and quantum computing era. This blog details the growing need for cloud-optimized HSMs (Hardware Security Modules) and their many critical 5G use cases from the device to the core network.
Marvell recently released its inaugural Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Report, detailing the company's goals, strategic approach, and commitment to building a sustainable future. Marvell's approach is based on the areas of greatest impact and opportunity for our company: integrating environmental and social considerations into our product design and responsibly managing the impacts of our supply chain, while focusing on strategic ESG initiatives that are material to our financial performance and long-term value creation.
Part of our overarching commitment to address ESG topics involves continuous improvement. That’s why Marvell has set a range of goals that showcase key areas of focus for our business, now and in the future.
By Kevin Koski, Product Marketing Director, Marvell
Last week, Marvell introduced Nova™, its latest, fourth generation PAM4 DSP for optical modules. It features breakthrough 200G per lambda optical bandwidth, which enables the module ecosystem to bring to market 1.6 Tbps pluggable modules. You can read more about it in the press release and the product brief.
In this post, I’ll explain why the optical modules enabled by Nova are the optimal solution to high-bandwidth connectivity in artificial intelligence and machine learning systems.
Let’s begin with a look into the architecture of supercomputers, also known as high-performance computing (HPC).
Historically, HPC has been realized using large-scale computer clusters interconnected by high-speed, low-latency communications networks to act as a single computer. Such systems are found in national or university laboratories and are used to simulate complex physics and chemistry to aid groundbreaking research in areas such as nuclear fusion, climate modeling and drug discovery. They consume megawatts of power.
The introduction of graphics processing units (GPUs) has provided a more efficient way to complete specific types of computationally intensive workloads. GPUs allow for the use of massive, multi-core parallel processing, while central processing units (CPUs) execute serial processes within each core. GPUs have both improved HPC performance for scientific research purposes and enabled a machine learning (ML) renaissance of sorts. With these advances, artificial intelligence (AI) is being pursued in earnest.
By Kim Markle, Director Influencer Relations, Marvell
Wind River and Marvell have collaborated to create an open, virtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN) solution for communication service providers (CSPs) that offers cloud scalability with the features, performance, and energy efficiency of established 5G networks. The collaboration integrates two complementary, industry-leading technologies—theMarvell® OCTEON® 10 Fusion 5G baseband processor and the Wind River Studio cloud software—to provide the carrier ecosystem a deployment-ready vRAN platform built on technologies that are widely proven in 5G networks and data centers.
CSPs aim to leverage established IT infrastructure for enhanced service agility and streamlined DevOps in the cloud-native RAN. Marvell's OCTEON 10 Fusion processor supports these goals with programmability based on open-source, industry-standard interfaces and integration with leading cloud software platforms such as Wind River Studio.
To ensure open-source distribution of Wind River Studio software, OCTEON 10 Fusion software drivers are being used by StarlingX, an open development and integration project. Marvell’s drivers enable Wind River Studio software to communicate with and control the OCTEON 10 Fusion processor. This facilitates developer access to an optimized vRAN system that offers new options for CSPs and helps to expand the carrier ecosystem of RAN and data center hardware and software suppliers, as well as system integrators.
By Johnny Truong, Senior Manager, Public Relations, Marvell
To address the growing demands of 5G applications (and beyond), networks are not only expected, but required, to offer features, performance, and capacity competitive with traditional RAN while improving energy efficiency and cost-savings.
Watch this video of Dennis Hoffman, SVP and GM of Dell’s Telecom Systems Business discuss how Dell and Marvell will continue building on its strategic partnership in pursuit of truly open mobile networks and how they’re bringing the power of Layer 1 Acceleration technology to the vRAN architecture with Marvell’s OCTEON® 10 Fusion processor, designed for 5G RAN.
By Kant Deshpande, Director, Product Management, Marvell
Disaggregation is the future Disaggregation—the decoupling of hardware and software—is arguably the future of networking. Disaggregation lets customers select best-of-breed hardware and software, enabling rapid innovation by separating the hardware and software development paths.
Disaggregation started with server virtualization and is being adapted to storage and networking technology. In networking, disaggregation promises that any networking operating system (NOS) can be integrated with any switch silicon. Open source-standards like ONIE allow a networking switch to load and install any NOS during the boot process.
SONiC: the Linux of networking OS Software for Open Networking in Cloud (SONiC) has been gaining momentum as the preferred open-source cloud-scale network operating system (NOS).
In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2025, 40% of organizations that operate large data center networks (greater than 200 switches) will run SONiC in a production environment.[i] According to Gartner, due to readily expanding customer interest and a commercial ecosystem, there is a strong possibility SONiC will become analogous to Linux for networking operating systems in next three to six years.
By Kristin Hehir, Senior Manager, PR and Marketing, Marvell
Marvell has been honored with two 2023 Lightwave Innovation Reviews high scores, validating its leadership in PAM4 DSP solutions for data infrastructure. The two awards reflect the industry’s recognition of Marvell’s recent best-in-class innovations to address the growing bandwidth and interconnect needs of cloud data center networks. An esteemed and experienced panel of third-party judges from the optical communications community recognized Marvell as a high-scoring honoree.
“On behalf of the Lightwave Innovation Reviews, I would like to congratulate Marvell on their high-scoring honoree status,” said Lightwave Editorial Director, Stephen Hardy. “This competitive program allows Lightwave to celebrate and recognize the most innovative products impacting the optical communications community this year.”
Marvell was recognized for the Marvell® Alaska® A PAM4 DSP Family for Active Electrical Cables (AECs) and the Marvell® Spica™ Gen 2 800G PAM4 Electro-Optics Platform, both in the Data Center Interconnect Platforms category. Key features of these 2023 Lightwave Innovation Reviews honorees include:
Marvell is committed to fostering an inclusive, diverse, and engaging workplace to fully leverage the perspectives and contributions of every individual at the company. We strive to create an environment where people feel fulfilled, inspired, and motivated to learn and grow, personally and professionally.
What Inclusion and Diversity Means to Marvell
Inclusion means focusing on respect, acceptance, and the ability to appreciate a culture-add approach where we can all bring our full authentic selves to work, every day.
To us, diversity means valuing differences. We value the unique perspectives and experiences of every employee. It is this uniqueness that every employee brings to the company, which is powerful and provides us with a competitive advantage.
Our Strategy
We have developed a strategy focused on four Inclusion & Diversity business outcomes:
By Johnny Truong, Senior Manager, Public Relations, Marvell
The Marvell® OCTEON® 10 DPU was awarded the 2022 Analysts’ Choice Awards for “Best Embedded Processor” in TechInsight’s Microprocessor Report.
One of the longest-running award programs of its kind, it salutes the top semiconductor offerings in the categories of data center, PC, smartphone, and embedded processors, as well as processor IP cores and related emerging technologies. Winning products were selected for superior features, performance, power, and cost in the context of the company’s target applications and competition.
The OCTEON 10 DPU--the world’s first Arm Neoverse N2-based processor in 5nm--is the latest version of the OCTEON processor family. By accelerating wireless, networking, storage, security and other specialized workloads, OCTEON 10 enables best-in-class features, performance, energy efficiency, and total cost of ownership for carriers, cloud providers, and enterprises.
The OCTEON processor family is used by four of the top six wireless infrastructure OEMs, in nine of the top 10 firewall appliances, and by other major networking OEMs.
TechInsight Chief Analyst Joseph Byrne said: “Processors for communications infrastructure have long pushed the leading edge for embedded products. Marvell’s feat shows that succeeding in the high-performance-embedded market doesn’t require leveraging smartphone or PC/server technology.”
Microprocessor Report subscribers can access commentary on the winners, details on what sets them apart, and other nominees in each category here.
To learn more about Marvell’s latest addition to the OCTEON DPU family, visit us at MWC 2023 in Barcelona at booth 2F34 in Hall 2.
By Peter Carson, Senior Director Solutions Marketing, Marvell
The rise of fully open and optimized vRAN platforms based on globally-proven 5G layer one hardware accelerators, led by Marvell, has given Open RAN operators the industry’s first no-compromise vRAN solution. Unlike the so-called “look-aside” general-purpose alternative, the Marvell architecture is host server CPU agnostic and uniquely enables (1) RAN software programmability, based on open source, industry standard interfaces and (2) inline hardware acceleration that delivers feature, performance and power parity as compared to existing 5G networks -- absolutely critical requirements of mobile operators. Listen to what leading operators are saying about inline vRAN accelerators.
By Rebecca O'Neill, Global Head of ESG, Marvell and Sandy Rodriguez, Sr. Compliance Analyst, Marvell
At Marvell, we are committed to giving back to the communities where we live and work. Our community engagement focuses on three key pillars:
Humanitarian endeavors supporting organizations that combat hunger, poverty and homelessness
Investing in innovative K–12 educational programs in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)
Championing community projects or initiatives to enrich the lives of our neighbors
The company will also match employee donations up to $500 per calendar year when an employee makes a donation to a nonprofit aligned with our philanthropic pillars. In addition, we launched a volunteer time off program, offering employees up to three days or 24 hours of paid time off per year to volunteer for causes they care about and support organizations working in our pillar areas. We aim to have at least 20% of our employees participate in our volunteer time off and employee match programs. Both of these endeavors are offered globally.
By Zvi Shmilovici Leib, Distinguished Engineer, Marvell
Industry 4.0 is redefining how industrial networks behave and how they are operated. Industrial networks are mission-critical by nature and have always required timely delivery and deterministic behavior. With Industry 4.0, these networks are becoming artificial intelligence-based, automated and self-healing, as well. As part of this evolution, industrial networks are experiencing the convergence of two previously independent networks: information technology (IT) and operational technology(OT). Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) is facilitating this convergence by enabling the use of Ethernet standards-based deterministic latency to address the needs of both the IT and OT realms.
However, the transition to TSN brings new challenges and requires fresh solutions for industrial network visibility. In this blog, we will focus on the ways in which visibility tools are evolving to address the needs of both IT managers and those who operate the new time-sensitive networks.
Why do we need visibility tools in industrial networks?
Networks are at the heart of the industry 4.0 revolution, ensuring nonstop industrial automation operation. These industrial networks operate 24/7, frequently in remote locations with minimal human presence. The primary users of the industrial network are not humans but, rather, machines that cannot “open tickets.” And, of course, these machines are even more diverse than their human analogs. Each application and each type of machine can be considered a unique user, with different needs and different network “expectations.”
By Amir Bar-Niv, VP of Marketing, Automotive Business Unit, Marvell and John Heinlein, Chief Marketing Officer, Sonatus and Simon Edelhaus, VP SW, Automotive Business Unit, Marvell
The software-defined vehicle (SDV) is one of the newest and most interesting megatrends in the automotive industry. As we discussed in a previous blog, the reason that this new architectural—and business—model will be successful is the advantages it offers to all stakeholders:
The OEMs (car manufacturers) will gain new revenue streams from aftermarket services and new applications;
The car owners will easily upgrade their vehicle features and functions; and
The mobile operators will profit from increased vehicle data consumption driven by new applications.
What is a software-defined vehicle? While there is no official definition, the term reflects the change in the way software is being used in vehicle design to enable flexibility and extensibility. To better understand the software-defined vehicle, it helps to first examine the current approach.
Today’s embedded control units (ECUs) that manage car functions do include software, however, the software in each ECU is often incompatible with and isolated from other modules. When updates are required, the vehicle owner must visit the dealer service center, which inconveniences the owner and is costly for the manufacturer.
I’m excited to share that Marvell is now a member of two leading automotive technology organizations: the Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge (SOAFEE) and the Autoware Foundation. Marvell’s participation in these organizations’ initiatives demonstrates its continued focus and investment in the automotive market. The new memberships follow the company’s 2021 announcement of its Brightlane™ automotive portfolio, and reflect Marvell’s expanding automotive silicon initiative.
SOAFEE, founded by Arm, is an industry-led collaboration defined by automakers, semiconductor suppliers, open source and independent software vendors, and cloud technology leaders. The collaboration intends to deliver a cloud-native architecture enhanced for mixed-criticality automotive applications with corresponding open-source reference implementations to enable commercial and non-commercial offerings.
As a member of SOAFEE, Marvell will access the SOAFEE architecture standards to help streamline development from cloud to deployment at the vehicle. This will enable faster time to market for the Marvell Brightlane automotive portfolio.
By Johnny Truong, Senior Manager, Public Relations, Marvell
At this weeks’ Leading Lights Awards Ceremony, hosted by Light Reading, Editor-in-Chief Phil Harvey announced that the Marvell® Deneb™ Coherent Digital Signal Processor (CDSP) is the winner of the Most Innovative Service Provider Transport Solution category. This recognition is awarded to the optical systems vendor or optical components vendor providing the most innovative optical transport solution for service provider customers.
Driving the industry's largest standards-based ecosystem, the Marvell Deneb CDSP enables disaggregation which is critical for carriers to lower their CAPEX and OPEX as they increase network capacity. This recognition underscores Marvell’s success in bringing leading-edge density and performance optimization advantages to carrier networks.
In its 18th year, the Leading Lights is Light Reading’s flagship awards program which recognizes top companies and executives for their outstanding achievements in next-generation communications technology, applications, services, strategies, and innovations.
Visit the Light Reading blog for a full list of categories, finalists and winners.
By Reza Eltejaein, Director, Product Marketing, Marvell
Manufacturers, power utilities and other industrial companies stand to gain the most in digital transformation. Manufacturing and construction industries account for 37 percent of total energy used globally*, for instance, more than any other sector. By fine-tuning operations with AI, some manufacturers can reduce carbon emission by up to 20 percent and save millions of dollars in the process.
Industry, however, remains relatively un-digitized and gaps often exist between operational technology – the robots, furnaces and other equipment on factory floors—and the servers and storage systems that make up a company’s IT footprint. Without that linkage, organizations can’t take advantage of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies, also referred to as Industry 4.0. Of the 232.6 million pieces of fixed industrial equipment installed in 2020, only 10 percent were IIoT-enabled.
Why the gap? IT often hasn’t been good enough. Plants operate on exacting specifications. Engineers and plant managers need a “live” picture of operations with continual updates on temperature, pressure, power consumption and other variables from hundreds, if not thousands, of devices. Dropped, corrupted or mis-transmitted data can lead to unanticipated downtime—a $50 billion year problem—as well as injuries, blackouts, and even explosions.
To date, getting around these problems has required industrial applications to build around proprietary standards and/or complex component sets. These systems work—and work well—but they are largely cut off from the digital transformation unfolding outside the factory walls.
The new Prestera® DX1500 switch family is aimed squarely at bridging this divide, with Marvell extending its modern borderless enterprise offering into industrial applications. Based on the IEEE 802.1AS-2020 standard for Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), Prestera DX1500 combines the performance requirements of industry with the economies of scale and pace of innovation of standards-based Ethernet technology. Additionally, we integrated the CPU and the switch—and in some models the PHY—into a single chip to dramatically reduce power, board space and design complexity.
Done right, TSN will lower the CapEx and OpEx for industrial technology, open the door to integrating Industry 4.0 practices and simplify the process of bringing new equipment to market.
I am delighted to announce that Marvell is a Member of the new Semiconductor Climate Consortium. We have been active participants of the group over the past several months and are happy to share that the Climate Consortium is publicly launching today.
Why a Consortium?
Acknowledging that climate action is collective action, Marvell has joined the Semiconductor Climate Consortium to work collaboratively with other semiconductor companies that have also embarked on a carbon reduction journey, to accelerate climate solutions and drive progressive climate action within our industry value chain.
The Consortium is an initiative of SEMI, the industry association serving the global electronics design and manufacturing supply chain, and it brings together all parts of the semiconductor ecosystem, including manufacturers, equipment providers, and fabless solutions providers such as Marvell. Everyone has a role to play in advancing the industry’s progress on addressing climate change. The Consortium believes that by working together, member companies will bring collective knowledge and innovative technologies to do so much more than one company can do alone.
The Consortium recognizes the challenge of climate change and works to speed semiconductor industry value chain efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including through support of the Paris Agreement and related accords driving the 1.5°C pathway.
Today is Energy Efficiency Day. Energy, specifically the electricity consumption required to power our chips, is something that is top of mind here at Marvell. Our goal is to reduce power consumption of products with each generation for set capabilities.
Our products play an essential role in powering data infrastructure spanning cloud and enterprise data centers, 5G carrier infrastructure, automotive vehicles, and industrial and enterprise networking. When we design our products, we focus on innovative features that deliver new capabilities while also improving performance, capacity and security to ultimately improve energy efficiency during product use.
These innovations help make the world’s data infrastructure more efficient and, by extension, reduce our collective impact on climate change. The use of our products by our customers contributes to Marvell’s Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions, which is our biggest category of emissions.
Today is Zero Emissions Day, which was started to raise awareness of the need to address climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Here at Marvell, we recognize that climate change represents an unprecedented challenge to our planet, society and economy. That’s why we are enhancing our climate strategy by setting a Science-Based Target (SBT) and putting ourselves on a path to net zero carbon emissions. Our SBT will be aligned with a 1.5°C climate scenario, supporting the goals of the Paris Agreement which is aimed at reducing the worst of climate change.
Our new ESG Report provides a snapshot of our company’s greenhouse gas emissions:
By Kristin Hehir, Senior Manager, PR and Marketing, Marvell
Flash Memory Summit (FMS), the industry’s largest conference featuring data storage and memory technology solutions, presented its 2022 Best of Show Awards at a ceremony held in conjunction with this week’s event. Marvell was named a winner alongside Exascend for the collaboration of Marvell’s edge and client SSD controller with Exascend’s high-performance memory card.
Honored as the “Most Innovative Flash Memory Consumer Application,” the Exascend Nitro CFexpress card powered by Marvell’s PCIe® Gen 4, 4-NAND channel 88SS1321 SSD controller enables digital storage of ultraHD video and photos in extreme temperature environments where ruggedness, endurance and reliability are critical. The Nitro CFexpress card is unique in controller, hardware and firmware architecture in that it combines Marvell’s 12nm process node, low-power, compact form factor SSD controller with Exascend’s innovative hardware design and Adaptive Thermal Control™ technology.
The Nitro card is the highest capacity VPG 400 CFexpress card on the market, with up to 1 TB of storage, and is certified VPG400 by the CompactFlash® Association using its stringent Video Performance Guarantee Profile 4 (VPG400) qualification. Marvell’s 88SS1321 controller helps drive the Nitro card’s 1,850 MB/s of sustained read and 1,700 MB/sustained write for ultimate performance.
“Consumer applications, such as high-definition photography and video capture using professional photography and cinema cameras, require the highest performance from their storage solution. They also require the reliability to address the dynamics of extreme environmental conditions, both indoors and outdoors,” said Jay Kramer, Chairman of the Awards Program and President of Network Storage Advisors Inc. “We are proud to recognize the collaboration of Marvell’s SSD controllers with Exascend’s memory cards, delivering 1,850 MB/s of sustained read and 1,700 MB/s sustained write for ultimate performance addressing the most extreme consumer workloads. Additionally, Exascend’s Adaptive Thermal Control™ technology provides an IP67 certified environmental hardening that is dustproof, water resistant and tackles the issue of overheating and thermal throttling.”
More information on the 2022 Flash Memory Summit Best of Show Award Winners can be found here.
By Kristin Hehir, Senior Manager, PR and Marketing, Marvell
Marvell is deeply committed to elevating women in STEM and supporting female engineers and entrepreneurs in their efforts to succeed in the tech industry. That’s why we are so proud to announce that Marvell team member Cora Lam has been named to the Silicon Valley Business Journal Women of Influence Class of 2022 for her successes and commitments in both workplace and community services.
Throughout the past 21 years, Marvell has been the nourishing ground to foster Cora’s professional development. With Cora’s dedication, creativity, and excellence in execution, she steadily progressed from a junior engineer to her now current position as Senior Principal Engineer in the Central Engineering group.
For the last five years, Cora also surprisingly discovered her two greatest passions within Marvell - Women in STEM and wellness. She believes you don’t need to be a CEO to promote women in STEM, instead, you just need to be your authentic self, utilizing motivation, passion, and compassion to empower others. To Cora, having genuine compassion for others without any agenda is the source of true wellness.
Despite Cora’s busy work schedule, Cora is one of the leaders and key volunteers for the Women at Marvell (WAM) initiative since its establishment in 2017. By organizing events such as International Women’s Day celebrations, speaker series, and panel discussions, WAM aims to inspire and foster a culture of diversity, gender equality and inclusion within Marvell.
Through a WAM meeting in 2018, Cora first heard about TechWomen (TW), an initiative from the U.S. Department of State that annually brings over 100 women Emerging Leaders (ELs) in STEM from 20+ countries in Africa, Central and South Asia, and the Middle East to the San Francisco Bay Area for a five-week intensive professional mentorship and networking program. For Cora, TW was like “love at first sight”, and she became Marvell’s first and only TW mentor in 2018.
By Kristin Hehir, Senior Manager, PR and Marketing, Marvell
Data Breakthrough, an independent market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and solutions in the global data technology market, today announced the 2022 winners of its Data Breakthrough Awards. Marvell is thrilled to share that its Bravera™ SC5 SSD controller family was named “Semiconductor Product of the Year” in the Hardware/Components & Infrastructure category.
Marvell’s Bravera SC5 controllers are the industry’s first PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers, enabling the highest performing data center flash storage solutions. By bringing unprecedented performance, best-in-class efficiency, and leading security features, Bravera SC5 addresses the critical requirements for scalable, containerized storage for optimal cloud infrastructure. Marvell’s Bravera SC5 doubles the performance compared to PCIe 4.0 SSDs, contributing to accelerated workloads and reduced latency, dramatically improving the user experience.
“Our Bravera SC5 controllers were developed alongside cloud providers, NAND vendors and the larger ecosystem to meet the critical requirements for faster and higher bandwidth cloud storage,” said Thad Omura, vice president of marketing, Flash Business Unit at Marvell. “This award further validates the innovative feature set our solution brings to address the ever-expanding workloads in the cloud. We thank Data Breakthrough for recognizing the vital role that semiconductors play across the digital data industry.”
The Data Breakthrough award nominations were evaluated by an independent panel of experts within the larger fields of data science and technology, with the winning products and companies selected based on a variety of criteria, including most innovative and technologically advanced solutions and services.
More information about the awards can be found here.
Last week, Moor Insights and Futurum Research kicked off The Six Five Summit, a virtual, on demand event focused on the latest developments and trends in digital transformation. Marvell was thrilled to join alongside the world’s leading technology companies to share insights on strategy, innovation and where the industry is heading.
Marvell’s Raghib Hussain, President, Products and Technologies participated in the event’s Cloud and Infrastructure Day to discuss the evolution of the cloud data center including the shift from application-specific to data-centric compute. In his presentation, “Accelerating the Cloud Data Center Evolution,” Raghib focuses on how scalability, performance and efficiency are driving technology infrastructure requirements and why optimized and customized silicon solutions are the future of the cloud.
By Amir Bar-Niv, VP of Marketing, Automotive Business Unit, Marvell
In the classic 1980s “Back to the Future” movie trilogy, Doc Brown – inventor of the DeLorean time machine – declares that "your future is whatever you make it, so make it a good one.” At Marvell, engineers are doing just that by accelerating automotive Ethernet capabilities: Earlier this week, Marvell announced the latest addition to its automotive products portfolio – the 88Q4346 802.3ch-based multi-gig automotive Ethernet PHY.
This technology addresses three emerging automotive trends requiring multi-gig Ethernet speeds, including:
The increasing integration of high-resolution cameras and sensors
The
BayAreaCIO
recognized chief information officers in eight key categories – Leadership,
Super Global, Global, Large Enterprise, Enterprise, Large Corporate, Corporate,
and Nonprofit/Public Sector.
“The BayAreaCIO ORBIE winners demonstrate the value great
leadership creates. Especially in these uncertain times, CIOs are leading in
unprecedented ways and enabling the largest work-from-home experiment in
history,” according to Lourdes Gipson, Executive Director of BayAreaCIO. “The
ORBIE Awards are meaningful because they are judged by peers - CIOs who
understand how difficult this job is and why great leadership matters.”
By Stacey Keegan, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Marvell
Yesterday Marvell announced its intent to join forces with Inphi, a leader in high-speed data movement. A premier company in the semiconductor industry, and one of the highest regarded companies in our space, Inphi’s highly complementary portfolio accelerates growth and leadership in cloud and 5G. The combination of the two companies is expected to create a U.S. semiconductor powerhouse with an enterprise value of approximately $40 billion.
Combined with explosive Internet traffic growth and the rollout of new ultra-fast 5G wireless networks, the importance of Inphi’s high-speed data interconnect solutions will only accelerate. The merged company will be uniquely positioned to serve the data-driven world, addressing high growth, attractive end markets – cloud data center and 5G.
President and CEO of Marvell, Matt Murphy had the opportunity to discuss the deal with CNBC’s Squawk Alley team after the news broke yesterday morning. Catch a replay of that video broadcast here to learn more.
By Stacey Keegan, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Marvell
Following the company’s 2020 Investor Day, Marvell President and CEO, Matt Murphy, joined Jim Cramer on CNBC’s Mad Money to discuss yesterday’s event highlights. Calling out significant growth opportunities across Marvell’s key market segments – including #5G, #DataCenter #Cloud and #Automotive – Murphy noted that adoption of both 5G and Cloud remain in the early innings and that Marvell is well positioned to see continued benefits from these long-term growth markets.
As working from home accelerates digital transformation, Marvell is building the next generation data infrastructure semiconductor technology that will power the world’s progress.
Watch more videos on the Marvell YouTube Channel & Subscribe: (Click Here)
By Stacey Keegan, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Marvell
Marvell President and CEO, Matt Murphy, discussed Marvell’s second quarter Earnings beat this morning with the CNBC Squawk Alley team.
Marvell’s growth is being driven by our success in our key data infrastructure end markets. Particularly, in looking at 5G wireless infrastructure we have seen 4 consecutive quarters of sequential growth. Right now, this is particularly pronounced in China, where 5G is being rolled out. But with other countries working on rollout plans, and 4 of the top 5 base station vendors as Marvell customers, the growth from 5G is just beginning.
Marvell also has a large and growing data center business, with both enterprise on-prem datacenters and now the cloud. We announced last quarter that cloud is now over 10% of our revenue and growing fast. And the reason we are seeing strong growth is that we are producing the key storage and security products for cloud. This includes chips for huge multi-terabyte hard drives, where all cloud data is stored. It also includes our networking products, which doubled year-over-year. And finally, growth in this area includes Marvell’s custom products that came to us through a recent acquisition. This is how several of the larger datacenter operators like to buy chips. Where we build exactly what they want.
By Stacey Keegan, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Marvell
Chris Koopmans, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Operations, recently joined Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman, hosts of the of The Six Five – Insiders Edition, to discuss the future of semiconductors and the critical role they’re playing in 5G, cloud, the automotive revolution, and the borderlessenterprise.
I highly encourage you to watch the video all the way to the end. Don’t have the time to catch the full episode? Skip to the closing commentary from the analysts where you’ll hear Pat and Dan discuss Marvell’s mission and focus on transforming the data infrastructure architecture of the future.
By Stacey Keegan, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Marvell
Marvell President and CEO, Matt Murphy, sat down with Jim
Cramer of CNBC’s Mad Money for a virtual chat about Marvell’s focus on data
infrastructure opportunities. Jim opened the segment congratulating Matt on a
spectacular quarter and the company’s 25th anniversary: “This is
not the Marvell of 25 years ago or even 25 months ago.”
With the company’s new brand identity on display, Matt
explained: “It’s been a great 25-year celebration of the company this year.
We’ve gone through a pretty substantial transformation really over the last 3-4
years…we set out to transform the company into a long-term player with a real
focus around what we viewed as the data infrastructure opportunity and as you
can see, as the strategy has played out over the last few years its extremely
relevant in today’s environment with now major growth drivers of the company
and our back in 5G, cloud, segments of enterprise and automotive.”
By Chris Koopmans, EVP of Marketing and Business Operations
Our transformation
Today we launched Marvell’s new brand identity. In many ways it’s long overdue – as it represents the transformation journey we have been on over the past four years and reflects the new company we have already become.
Often when a company embarks on a major change, one of the first things they focus on is their external image. They update their logo, web page, and collateral to resemble the brand they aspire to, and then work to make reality match the aspiration. But in our industry, a company’s brand is their reputation, and a reputation is earned. That’s why, at Marvell, we started with the hard part – we established our new strategy, transformed our business and revamped our culture first, and now we are revealing a new brand that reflects who we are. I believe that signifies our culture – focus on the substance first.
I joined Marvell four years ago – just a few weeks prior to Matt taking over as CEO – so I’ve been on this journey every step of the way. I’ve had the privilege of holding a variety of leadership roles through the transformation, giving me a unique perspective on the company we have become. So, when Matt came to me last year with a new challenge – to lead our Marketing team through a rebuild of Marvell’s external image – I was thrilled about the opportunity.
By Matt Murphy, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Marvell
The world as we knew it just a few months ago may never be quite the same again. This pandemic has created an extraordinary crisis that will test our systems and our values alike. It also reminds us of what we hold most dear – our personal connections with other people. As billions of us shelter in our homes around the clock – working, exercising, educating, and sharing the same space - it is an opportunity to appreciate quality time with our immediate family. But we are also missing our connections with loved ones who aren’t under the same roof, and worry about the health and safety of our more vulnerable relatives. We miss seeing our colleagues at work – not on a computer screen, but in hallways and over lunch. And we miss seeing friends in our communities, enjoying a meal at our favorite restaurant, shopping at the farmers market, and hiking in our now shuttered parks.
By Stacey Keegan, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Marvell
Marvell President and CEO, Matt Murphy, joined Jim Cramer
and the team of CNBC’s Squawk Alley to talk about the impact of COVID-19
on the semiconductor market, including 5G, the broader business community and
the company’s unwavering mission.
Matt shared his thoughts on the critical role that
semiconductor technology plays in the current world crisis, particularly given the
excess load that has been put on every nation’s data infrastructure due to
remote work. And, how semiconductors are the essential building blocks of the
networks of the world – from 5G to cloud infrastructure to advanced
interconnect products.
“Companies are re-thinking their work force and footprint
and 5G is a critical part of that. “5G will play a key role not only because of
the bandwidth, improved data rates, but the lower latency and improved
reliability of that network I think will be a big deal for remote work and
different ways of working in the future.”
By Gopal Hegde, Vice President and General Manager of the Server Processor Business Unit, Marvell
The data centers of today have shifted from a focus on
single thread performance to performance at rack scale with performance/watt,
performance/$ and overall TCO being the key drivers to deployment. These data centers
are making use of servers that are customized for specific workloads. The
applications running on these servers are either based on open source software
or controlled by the customers who deploy them. Marvell’s ThunderX2® server processor is a
leading example of this evolution in the server market with deployments
spanning across the cloud and HPC market segments with major customers like
Microsoft Azure and the Astra Top 500 Supercomputer installation at Sandia
National Laboratories.
By Avishai Ziv, General Manager of Security Solutions Business Unit, Marvell
Given a choice, few enterprises will change their security solutions and deployments, especially for data encryption. That’s because any change in data encryption can be a painful and daunting task. But in today’s world of growing threats to data security, is there really a choice?
Risk is High
Most of the data breaches we read about in the headlines, which have affected hundreds of millions of customers at prominent companies, have involved data that wasn’t encrypted. Unfortunately, such lax security is all too common. A recent McAfee survey of 12,000 companies that revealed only 9% encrypt their data at rest in the cloud, and only 1% are using customer-managed encryption keys.
Being a trusted advisor to our customers means making sure what we recommend, configure and install works as expected. That’s why here at DTP, we recommend Marvell® QLogic® Fibre Channel and Marvell FastLinQ® Ethernet I/O for all our server and storage connectivity solutions.
The DTP Group has over 30 years of experience in delivering technology and solutions to our customers. We only recommend HPE for server, storage and networking solutions because we know the technology, get great support from the HPE organization and trust the HPE brand. Within the HPE portfolio, there are technology choices that need to be considered, especially when it comes to I/O connectivity. HPE makes a variety Ethernet and Fibre Channel connectivity options available that they source from several different manufacturers. After evaluating all of them, the DTP PreSales and Technical teams have chosen to standardize on 10/25/50GbE based on Marvell FastLinQ technology and on 16GFC and 32GFC based on Marvell QLogic technology.
Innovation can come in many forms. Sometimes it’s with a completely new technology, sometimes with updating an existing product and in other cases, just by changing the approach to how you acquire and deliver a product. It is the latter that is the latest innovation from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) when it comes to I/O connectivity.
In conjunction with the launch of HPE ProLiant and Apollo Gen10 Plus servers, the HPE Server I/O Options team developed a new approach for sourcing and qualifying Ethernet adapters for these servers. Deploying what they call Industry Standard Adapters, HPE can now better meet the needs of their end customers with an increased number of options when it comes to firmware and driver updates for their Ethernet adapters in HPE servers.
Traditionally, HPE would source I/O technology from OEM suppliers such as Marvell, create customer model numbers and specifications for adapters and make firmware and drives only available from HPE. These “custom” adapters were often referred to as HPE-optimized. Starting with Gen10 Plus servers, HPE is eliminating the customization and using standard adapters that can work not only in HPE servers, but in others as well. Hence the term “Industry Standard Adapters.”
Marvell is glad to be a strategic partner of HPE, providing a wide variety of Marvell® FastLinQ® adapters that are fully qualified and supported by HPE on the HPE ProLiant Gen10 Plus servers. Below are the current offerings from Marvell for HPE Gen10 Plus servers.
With the new approach, HPE Gen10 Plus customers can see the Marvell model numbers in the HPE product description and identify the Marvell vendor and product IDs at server boot. Then they will be directed to Marvell for detailed specifications, user guides, technical briefs and even firmware and/or driver downloads. The support model will not change and HPE will continue to provide level 1 - 3 support. The new approach will benefit HPE customers in a number of ways:
Transparency of the specific type of product and model information – eliminates having to use complex decoder aides or other documentation to determine real manufacturer.
Consistency in product/model naming on Operating System HCLs that saves time cross-checking I/O and operating system compatibility.
Faster time-to-market for firmware/driver enhancements and updates to get fixes when they are available from the manufacturer.
Ability to streamline maintenance process across multi-vendor server environments and get firmware/drivers direct from manufacturer websites.
For those HPE ProLiant customers who prefer utilizing HPE-specific deployment software and utilities like HPE System Insight Manager (SIM), System Update Manager (SUM) or Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP), HPE will also make firmware and drivers available through their normal quarterly processes.
The Marvell portfolio for HPE ProLiant Gen10 Plus includes PCIe and OCP 3.0 form factor adapters in 1/10GBASE-T, 10Gb SFP+ and 10/25GbE SFP28 variants. All these adapters support Marvell’s industry-leading list of features and capabilities, including:
Universal RDMA: allows customers to run RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) or iWARP RDMA concurrently.
SmartAN™ technology: automatically sets bandwidth and forward error correction settings of the adapter to match the switch it is connected to and the cable type being used.
Redfish PLDM: provides integrated remote monitoring and management of thermal environment and other adapter data.
Marvell FastLinQ QCS Management Utility: available as GUI, CLI, VMware plug-in or PowerShell Kit for maximum flexibility.
DPDK Offload: up to 68Mpps bi-directional small packet acceleration.
SR-IOV offload for virtual server environments.
Tunnel Offloads: VXLAN, NVGRE, GENEVE.
NVMe over fabric: for high performance SDS/HCI or shared storage connectivity.
IEEE 1588 Energy Efficient Ethernet
PCIe 3.0 x8 and OCP 3.0 form factors
For more details on Marvell’s FastLinQ adapters, download the family product brief here.
For more information on Universal RDMA, SmartAN technology and other unique Marvell FastLinQ capabilities, visit our Follow the Wire Video library
By Stacey Keegan, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Marvell
Today marks the close of the acquisition of Avera Semi.
Avera brings over two decades of expertise developing custom ASIC solutions for the infrastructure market, further enabling Marvell to offer a full suite of leading semiconductor solutions. With this acquisition, Marvell will provide the complete spectrum of product architectures spanning standard, semi-custom to full ASIC solutions. We are proud to offer world class custom ASIC design services to our OEM partners.
By Stacey Keegan, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Marvell
Marvell today announced that it has successfully completed its acquisition of Aquantia.
Aquantia pioneered Multi-Gig technology – now the basis for high speed networking in a broad range of applications from enterprise campuses to autonomous cars. Their portfolio complements Marvell’s industry-leading PHYs, switches and processors, creating an unparalleled networking platform and enabling customers to develop systems that span megabits to terabits per second. To learn more, read our latest press release https://www.marvell.com/company/news/pressDetail.do?releaseID=11257.
By Stacey Keegan, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Marvell
Monday, August 26, marked the anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment being signed into law and granting American women the constitutional right to vote. To commemorate the impending 100-year celebration, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group kicked off a series of organized events meant to honor women trailblazers and host a call to women leaders from all walks of life. Built into our core values around diversity and equality, empowering women to be leaders is important to Marvell and its executive leadership team, and the company was a proud sponsor of Monday’s event.
The day-long series of panel discussions celebrating the achievements of women since the suffrage movement took place at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View and was filled with some of the most accomplished women in Silicon Valley and the country.
Monday’s event featuring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the highest-ranking woman in U.S. politics and second in line to the presidency, Anna Eshoo, the Democratic congresswoman, whose district includes Moffett Field, and NASA astronaut, Megan McArthur, focused more broadly on women leadership and the state of gender equality in business.
The day included a panel called Women in Innovation and another named Women Leaders Across Generations, each moderated and filled with some of the top women at local and national companies like Silicon Valley Bank, Ripple, eBay, AT&T, Genentech, NASA, Marvell, Micron, and the San Francisco 49ers. Marvell’s Chief Compliance Officer, Regan MacPherson, moderated the latter during which science and tech executives used their own experiences to frame a conversation on how far women have come and how far they still must go.
Data is the new currency for many businesses today. The ability to access, analyze and act on data has become a competitive advantage for many companies. While much attention is paid to the storage devices and compute required to optimize data processing, the I/O infrastructure is often overlooked. The reality is that I/O technologies are just as important as the core count of the CPU or storage capacity and latency of the storage array. The time is now to future-proof your network and that’s where Marvell is here to help.
Marvell has been a long-time Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) supplier of I/O technology used in the HPE ProLiant, Apollo, HPE Synergy, and HPE Storage offerings. Over the past year, a new generation of Ethernet I/O has begun making its way into these HPE platforms. Based on Marvell® FastLinQ® QL41000 and QL45000 Ethernet technology, these new adapters are allowing HPE customers to “future-proof their network” connectivity for what’s to come in the near future of data centers.
The QL41000 and QL45000 adapter technology provides several new capabilities not found in other I/O offerings for HPE. Advancements include:
Universal RDMA – provides customers with flexibility through concurrent support for both RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and iWARP RDMA protocols on the same adapter.
SmartAN™ Technology – enables auto-negotiation for transitioning from 10GbE to 25GbE connections. SmartAN automatically configures the adapter for bandwidth and error code correction based on the cabling configuration and switch port settings the adapter is connected to.
Storage Offload – Converge Network Adapter offerings include full hardware offload for iSCSI and FCoE protocols which greatly reduces the CPU resources required for transmitting storage traffic compared to the use of software initiators.
These are in addition to enhanced DPDK performance (up to 36Mpps bi-directional) and support for SR-IOV, TCP/IP stateless offloads, IEEE 1588 time stamping and more.
The FastLinQ 41000 series technology can be found in next-generation Flexible LOM Rack (FLR) and standup PCIe adapters for HPE ProLiant and Apollo servers. Models include:
HPE Ethernet 10Gb 521-T Adapter
HPE Ethernet 10Gb 524SFP+ Adapters
HPE Ethernet 10/25Gb 621SFP28 Adapter
HPE Ethernet 10/25Gb 622FLR CNA
HPE StoreFabric 10Gb CN1200-T CNA
HPE StoreFabric 10/25Gb CN1300R CNA
These adapters allow HPE Server customers to future-proof their Rack and Tower servers with RDMA for use in Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) and Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions; and make the transition from 10GbE to 25GbE connectivity seamless at the server. These I/O devices are ideal for customers considering Microsoft Azure Stack HCI or VMware vSAN environments, or the deployment of any latency sensitive application.
The FastLinQ 45000 series technology can be found in next-generation mezzanine adapters for HPE Synergy, including:
HPE Synergy 10/20/25Gb 4820C Adapter
HPE Synergy 25/50GbE 6810C Adapter
With Universal RDMA support improved DPDK performance and high-bandwidth capability, these adapters are ideal for customers with VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V deployments, and for Telco or high-frequency trading applications.
Since many applications today will start to require more I/O performance and low latency RDMA, HPE’s next-gen Ethernet adapters will go a long way in future proofing networking connectivity for server customers.
For a complete list of Marvell FastLinQ Ethernet adapters for HPE Servers and the features they support, download our HPE FastLinQ Ethernet Quick Reference guide. If you would like to discuss I/O technology or customer needs in more detail, contact our HPE team . You can also visit the Marvell HPE microsite at www.marvell.com/hpe.
By Larry Wikelius, Vice President, Ecosystem and Partner Enabling, Marvell
ISC High Performance, which just wrapped up today in Frankfurt, Germany, is one of the most significant server events of the year and is often a catalyst for key major industry announcements. This year’s event was no exception with NVIDIA announcing its support for servers based on the Arm architecture. With this move, NVIDIA will make its full stack of AI and high-performance computing software available to the Arm ecosystem by the end of 2019. The stack includes all NVIDIA CUDA-X AI and HPC libraries, GPU-accelerated AI frameworks and software development tools such as PGI compilers with OpenACC support and profilers. NVIDIA’s full software suite support will enable the acceleration of more than 600 HPC applications and AI frameworks on Marvell® ThunderX2® systems.
NVIDIA’s support for Arm CPUs marks continued growth of the Arm-based server ecosystem. Marvell has been a leading driver in the establishment of a standard, complete and competitive ecosystem around the Arm architecture ranging from low level firmware through system software to commercial ISV applications. The Marvell ThunderX2 processor is the most widely deployed Arm server in the market today and the only Arm server on the prestigious top 500 super computer list with the Astra system at Sandia National Laboratories.
NVIDIA’s announcement underscores the growing momentum of Marvell ThunderX2 in both high-performance computing and cloud deployments. The entire industry is very excited about the ability to combine the computational performance and memory bandwidth of ThunderX2 with the parallel processing capabilities of the GPU. NVIDIA’s commitment to the complete software stack is particularly important and is yet another high value solution option in the broadly supported software offering on ThunderX2. Most ThunderX2 systems have been designed with GPU support in mind from the beginning which enables a simple upgrade for today’s installed base.
Marvell welcomes NVIDIA to the ThunderX2 ecosystem and we look forward to working with customers on this exciting server solution. See the press release here.
Read more about what the industry is saying about the announcement, and what this means to high-performance computing:
By Stacey Keegan, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Marvell
Marvell President and CEO Matt Murphy joined Jim Cramer, host of the widely acclaimed finance television program, Mad Money, for an engaging discussion on where Marvell has been and where the company is headed.
Jim was interested in learning more about the four deals that Marvell announced over the last month including the acquisitions of Aquantia and Avera, and the 5G growth opportunities moving forward.
In his interview with Jim, Matt highlighted the key technologies needed to play in the infrastructure market—processors, networking, storage and security—all of which Marvell has. Aquantia helps Marvell strengthen its move to the connected car where a best-in-class network is needed to address the trends in autonomous vehicles, electrification, and safety/security, and the shift from analog interfaces to Ethernet technology.
With the acquisition of Avera, Marvell essentially double downs on 5G, Matt explains. He emphasizes that the 5G cycle is just beginning —“not even in the first inning yet”— with the build-out of this infrastructure starting now and continuing robustly through 2020. Avera’s biggest end market exposure is base stations and Avera will enable a new custom chip design business for Marvell.
To hear more from Matt and Jim’s discussion, and learn about how Marvell is at the infrastructure epicenter to address 5G, the cloud, AI, enterprise hardware and the connected car, click the below video.
By Stacey Keegan, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Marvell
The Marvell Finance team, in partnership with Deloitte, has undergone a significant transformation over the past three years to ensure the delivery of error-free financial reporting and analytics for the business. After successfully completing another 10Q filing on June 7, the Marvell Finance team and Deloitte celebrated by giving back to the local community and volunteering at Salvation Army. Proceeds from the donations sold in Salvation Army Family Stores are used to fund the Salvation Army’s Substance Abuse program in downtown San Jose. The program provides housing, work preparedness and rehabilitation free of charge to registered participants.
This event demonstrates Marvell’s commitment to enriching the communities where we live and work. Well done, team.
Women today comprise 47% of the overall workforce; however, only 15% choose engineering. As part of Marvell’s commitment to diversity and inclusion in the workplace, the company is proud to support the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative (WLI) to make an impact for women in STEM moving forward.
The GSA WLI seeks to significantly grow the number of women entering the semiconductor industry and increase the number of women on boards and in leadership positions.
As part of the initiative, which was announced yesterday, the GSA has established the WLI Council that will create and implement programs and projects towards meeting the WLI objectives. WLI Council harnesses the leadership of women who have risen to the top ranks of the semiconductor industry. Marvell’s own chief financial officer, Jean Hu, alongside 16 other women executives, will utilize their experiences to provide inspiration for and sponsorship of the next generation of female leaders.
“I am honored to be amongst a highly talented and diverse group of women at GSA WLI Council to help ensure that women are an integral part of the leadership of the semiconductor industry,” said Jean Hu, CFO of Marvell. “Marvell and GSA share a vision to elevate the women in STEM and support female entrepreneurs in their efforts to succeed in the tech industry.”
Today, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is primarily being utilized within high performance computing or cloud environments to reduce latency across the network. Enterprise customers will soon require low latency networking that RDMA offers so that they can address a variety of different applications, such as Oracle and SAP, and also implement software-defined storage using Windows Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) or VMware vSAN. There are three protocols that can be used in RDMA deployment: RDMA over InfiniBand, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), and RDMA over iWARP. Given that there are several possible routes to go down, how do you ensure you pick the right protocol for your specific tasks?
In the enterprise sector, Ethernet is by far the most popular transport technology. Consequently, we can ignore the InfiniBand option, as it would require a forklift upgrade to the I/O existing infrastructure - thus making it way too costly for the vast majority of enterprise data centers. So, that just leaves RoCE and iWARP. Both can provide low latency connectivity over Ethernet networks. But which is right for you?
Let’s start by looking at the fundamental differences between these two protocols. RoCE is the most popular of the two and is already being used by many cloud hyper-scale customers worldwide. RDMA enabled adapters running RoCE are available from a variety of vendors including Marvell.
RoCE provides latency at the adapter in the 1-5us range but requires a lossless Ethernet network to achieve low latency operation. This means that the Ethernet switches integrated into the network must support data center bridging and priority flow control mechanisms so that lossless traffic is maintained. It is likely they will therefore have to be reconfigured to use RoCE. The challenge with the lossless or converged Ethernet environment is that configuration is a complex process and scalability can be very limited in a modern enterprise context. Now it is not impossible to use RoCE at scale but to do so requires the implementation of additional traffic congestion control mechanisms, like Data Center Quantized Congestion Notification (DCQCN), which in turn calls for large, highly-experienced teams of network engineers and administrators. Though this is something that hyper-scale customers have access to, not all enterprise customers can say the same. Their human resources and financial budgets can be more limited.
Going back through the history of converged Ethernet environments, one must look no further than Fibre Channel over Converged Ethernet (FCoE) to see the size of the challenge involved. Five years ago, many analysts and industry experts claimed FCoE would replace Fibre Channel in the data center. That simply didn’t happen because of the complexity associated with using converged Ethernet networks at scale. FCoE still survives, but only in closed environments like HPE BladeSystem or HPE Synergy servers, where the network properties and scale are carefully controlled. These are single-hop environments with only a few connections in each system.
Finally, we come to iWARP. This came on the scene after RoCE and has the advantage of running on today’s standard TCP/IP networks. It provides latency at the adapter in the range of 10-15us. This is higher than what one can achieve by implementing RoCE but is still orders of magnitude below that of standard Ethernet adapters.
They say, if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. That’s the same when it comes to vendors touting their RDMA-enabled adapters. Most vendors only support one protocol, so of course that is the protocol they will recommend. Here at Marvell, we are unique in that with our Universal RDMA technology, a customer can use both RoCE and iWARP on the same adapter. This gives us more credibility when making recommendations and means that we are effectively protocol agnostic. It is really important from a customer standpoint, as it means that we look at what is the best fit for their application criteria.
So which RDMA protocol do you use when? Well, when latency is the number one criteria and scalability is not a concern, the choice should be RoCE. You will see RoCE implemented as the back-end network in modern disk arrays, between the controller node and NVMe drives. You will also find RoCE deployed within a rack or where there is only one or two top-of-rack switches and subnets to contend with. Conversely, when latency is a key requirement, but ease-of-use and scalability are also high priorities, iWARP is the best candidate. It runs on the existing network infrastructure and can easily scale between racks and even long distances across data centers. A great use case for iWARP is as the network connectivity option for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct implementations.
The good news for enterprise customers is that several Marvell® FastLinQ® Ethernet Adapters from HPE support Universal RDMA, so they can take advantage of low latency RDMA in the way that best suits them. Here’s a list of HPE Ethernet adapters that currently support both RoCE and iWARP RDMA. With RDMA-enabled adapters for HPE ProLiant, Apollo, HPE Synergy and HPE Cloudline servers, Marvell has a strong portfolio of 10Gb or 25GbE connectivity solutions for data centers. In addition to supporting low latency RDMA, these adapters are also NVMe-ready. This means they can accommodate NVMe over Ethernet fabrics running RoCE or iWARP, as well as supporting NVMe over TCP (with no RDMA). They are a great choice for future-proofing the data center today for the workloads of tomorrow.
For more information on these and other Marvell I/O technologies for HPE, go to www.marvell.com/hpe.
If you’d like to talk with one of our I/O experts in the field, you’ll find contact info here.
Marvell shared its mission and focus on driving the core technology to enable the global network infrastructure at its recent investor day. This was followed up with an appearance at Nasdaq, where Matt Murphy, president and CEO of the company, rang the bell to open the stock exchange.
At both of these events in New York City, Marvell shared how far the company has come, where it was going, and reaffirmed its mission: To provide semiconductor solutions that process, move, store and secure the world’s data faster and more reliably than anyone else.
The world has become more connected and intelligent than ever, and the global network has also evolved at an astonishing rate. It’s imperative that the semiconductor industry advances even quicker to keep up with these new technology trends and stay relevant. Marvell recognizes that its customers, at the core or on the edge, face the daunting challenge of delivering solutions for this ever-changing world – today.
With both the breadth and depth of technology expertise, Marvell offers the critical technology elements — storage, Ethernet, Arm® processors, security processors and wireless connectivity — to drive innovation in the industry. With the Cavium acquisition, the company retains its strong and stable foothold while competing more aggressively and innovating faster to serve customers better.
For Marvell the future isn’t a distant challenge: it is here with us now, evolving at an accelerated pace. Marvell is enabling new technologies such as 5G, disrupting new Flash platform solutions for the data center, revolutionizing the in-car network, and developing new compute architectures for artificial intelligence, to name a few.
Bringing the most complete infrastructure portfolio of any semiconductor company, Marvell is more than ready to continue on its amazing journey, and have its customers and partners alongside it on the cutting-edge—today, tomorrow and beyond.
By Sree Durbha, Head of Smart-Connected Business, Marvell
The consumer drone market has expanded greatly over the last few years, with almost 3 million units shipped during 2017. This upward trend is likely to continue. Analyst firm Statista forecasts that the commercial drone business will be worth $6.4 billion annually by 2020, while Global Market Insights has predicted that the worldwide drone market will grow to $17 billion (with the consumer category accounting for $9 billion of that). As new products are continually being introduced into what is already an acutely overcrowded marketplace, a differentiated offering is therefore critical to a successful product.
One of the newest and most exciting entrants into this crowded drone market, Tello, features functionality that sets it apart from rival offerings. Tello is manufactured by Shenzhen-based start-up Ryze Tech, a subsidiary of well-known brand DJI, which is the world’s largest producer of drones and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). With a 13 minute runtime, plus a flight distance of up to 100 meters, this is an extremely maneuverable and compact quadcopter drone. It weighs just 80 grams and can fit into the palm of a typical teenager’s hand (with dimensions of 98 x 92.5 x 41 millimeters). The two main goals of the Tello are fun and education. To that end, a smartphone App-based control provides a fun user interface for everyone, including young people, to play with. The educational goal is met through an easy to program visual layout that allows users to write their own code using the comprehensive software development kit (SDK) included in the package. What really distinguishes Tello from other drones, however, is the breadth of its imaging capabilities - and this is where engaging with Marvell has proven pivotal.
Tello’s original drone design requirement called for livestreaming 720p MP4 format video, using its 5 Megapixel image sensor, back to the user’s smartphone or tablet even while traveling at its maximum speed of 8 meters/second. This called for interoperability testing with a broad array of smartphone and tablet models. Due to its small size, conserving battery life would be a key requirement, which meant ultra-low power consumption by Wi-Fi®. Underlying all of this was the singular requirement for a strong wireless connection to be maintained at all times. Finally, as is always the case, Wi-Fi would need to fit in the low bill of materials for the product.
Initial discussions between technical teams at Ryze and Marvell revealed a perfect match between the features offered on the Marvell® 1x1 802.11n single-band Wi-Fi system-on-chip (SoC) and the Wi-Fi requirements for the Tello drone project. This chip was already widely adopted in the market and established itself as a proven solution for various customer applications, including video transmission in IP cameras, mobile routers, IoT gateways etc. Ryze chose this chipset, banking on its reliability while transmitting high-definition video over the air, exceptional RF performance over range while offering ultra-low power operation, all at a competitive price point.
Marvell’s Wi-Fi SoC is a highly integrated, single-band (2.4GHz) IC that delivers IEEE® 802.11b/g/n operation in a single spatial stream (1 SS) configuration. It incorporates a power amplifier (PA), a low noise amplifier (LNA) and a transmit/receive switch. Quality of Service (QoS) is guaranteed through the 802.11e standard implementation. The Wi-Fi SoC’s compliance with the 802.11i security protocol, plus built-in wired equivalent privacy (WEP) algorithms, enable 128-bit encryption of transmitted data, thereby protecting the data from being intercepted by third parties. All of these hardware features are supported by Marvell’s robust Wi-Fi software, which includes a small footprint and full featured Wi-Fi firmware tied in with the hardware level features. Specific features such as infrastructure mode operation were developed to enable the functionality desired by Ryze for the Tello.
Marvell’s industry-leading Wi-Fi technology has enabled an exciting new user experience in the Tello, at a level of sophistication that previously would only have been seen in expensive, professional-grade equipment. In order to bring this professional quality experience to an entry-level drone model meant that significant power, performance and cost barriers were overcome. As we enter the 802.11ax era of Wi-Fi industry transition, expect Marvell to launch first-to-market, ever more envelope-pushing, technological advances such as uplink OFDMA.
By Kelvin Vivian, Director of Intellectual Property, Marvell
The term ‘innovation’ is frequently used in business today. For many, the term means providing ideas out of the blue, which lead to mind blowing discoveries and achievements.
While this might be the perceived outcome of innovation, the reality is that true innovation can arise in a variety of different forms and can have any sizeable impact, and a healthy dose of creativity and idea sharing must be encouraged if businesses are to effectively harness the innovative potential of its employees.
At Marvell, we pride ourselves on working together collaboratively and creatively and this enables employees to be the most innovative versions of themselves, and such is what largely contributes to our sixth consecutive year of inclusion in the Clarivate Analytics Top 100 Global Innovators list.
Placement on the list has become the standard measure for innovation across the world and is recognized as a significant achievement. The award itself is based in part on global reach — we hold more than 9,000 patents worldwide — grant success rates and influence of patented technology, and it serves as a testament to Marvell’s culture of innovation and commitment to providing differentiated, breakthrough technology solutions.
While inclusion on this list provides a celebratory point of reflection for all of us at Marvell, it also is a reminder of the work that lays ahead of us and our colleagues across industry who, while competing, also share a common passion and goal, which simply put – is to make technology that makes life better. And in today’s market especially, it’s more important than ever that we and our partners continue to push the boundaries of innovation at every turn. As the physicist Albert Einstein said, “You can’t solve a problem on the same level that it was created. You have to rise above it to the next level.”
So while we extend our congratulations to colleagues and competitors alike, without whom there would be no yardstick to measure ourselves by and no goal to aim for; we can’t wait to see what new innovations and types of critical and creative thinking this year will bring.
Key representatives of the global technology sector were gathered together at the San Jose Convention Center last week to hear the recipients of this year’s Annual Creativity in Electronics (ACE) Awards announced. This prestigious awards event, which is organized in conjunction with leading electronics engineering magazines EDN and EE Times, highlights the most innovative products announced in the last 12 months, as well as recognizing visionary executives and the most promising new start-ups. A panel made up of the editorial teams of these magazines, plus several highly respected independent judges, were all involved in the process of selecting the winner in each category. The 88NV1160 high performance controller for non-volatile memory express (NVMe), which was introduced by Marvell earlier this year, fought off tough competition from companies like Diodes Inc. and Cypress Semiconductor to win the coveted Logic/Interface/Memory category. Marvell gained two further nominations at the awards - with 98PX1012 Prestera PX Passive Intelligent Port Extender (PIPE) also being featured in the Logic/Interface/Memory category, while the 88W8987xA automotive wireless combo SoC was among those cited in the Automotive category.
Designed for inclusion in the next generation of streamlined portable computing devices (such as high-end tablets and ultra-books), the 88NV1160 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) controllers are able to deliver 1600MB/s read speeds while simultaneously keeping the power consumption required for such operations extremely low (<1.2W). Based on a 28nm low power CMOS process, each of these controller ICs has a dual core 400MHz Arm® Cortex®-R5 processor embedded into it.
Through incorporation of a host memory buffer, the 88NV1160 exhibits far lower latency than competing devices. It is this that is responsible for accelerating the read speeds supported. By utilizing its embedded SRAM, the controller does not need to rely on an external DRAM memory - thereby simplifying the memory controller implementation. As a result, there is a significant reduction in the board space required, as well as a lowering of the overall bill-of-materials costs involved.
The 88NV1160’s proprietary NANDEdge™ low density parity check error-correction functionality raises SSD endurance and makes sure that long term system reliability is upheld throughout the end product’s entire operational lifespan. The controller’s built-in 256-bit AES encryption engine ensures that stored metadata is safeguarded from potential security breaches. Furthermore, these DRAM-less ICs are very compact, thus enabling multiple-chip package integration to be benefitted from.
Consumers are now expecting their portable electronics equipment to possess a lot more computing resource, so that they can access the exciting array of new software apps that are now becoming available; making use of cloud-based services, enjoying augmented reality and gaming. At the same time as offering functions of this kind, such items of equipment need to be able to support longer periods between battery recharges, so as to further enhance the user experience derived. This calls for advanced ICs combining strong processing capabilities with improved power efficiency levels and that is where the 88NV1160 comes in. "We're excited to honor this robust group for their dedication to their craft and efforts in bettering the industry for years to come," said Nina Brown, Vice President of Events at UBM Americas. "The judging panel was given the difficult task of selecting winners from an incredibly talented group of finalists and we'd like to thank all of those participants for their amazing work and also honor their achievements. These awards aim to shine a light on the best in today's electronics realm and this group is the perfect example of excellence within both an important and complex industry."
By Sree Durbha, Head of Smart-Connected Business, Marvell
The concept of a fully ‘connected home’ has been discussed for more than 20 years. However, widespread proliferation has taken far longer than anyone could have originally imagined. For a long time, deployment activity seemed to be limited to a relatively small number of high value installations. These installations were generally complicated to implement and their operation was not very user-friendly. Most importantly, they were composed of an amalgamation of isolated subsystems from different suppliers rather than a single universal system.
Even as home automation started to become accessible from smartphones and tablets, market fragmentation meant that each aspect of the automation technology installed within a home was still based on its own proprietary mechanism that needed a separate app to control it. As a result, home automation systems have often proven inconvenient and frustrating for those operating them and has unquestionably held back their adoption by consumers. The industry fragmentation and lack of interoperability between different vendor ecosystems meant that the consumer couldn’t really take advantage of the connected capabilities of all the various platforms.
The industry is innovating with solutions that seem finally likely to help broaden the appeal of home automation and accelerate its future progression. Through its HomeKit™ technology, Apple is looking to consolidate all the various verticals under a single, comprehensive home automation ecosystem that works together easily and securely. The HomeKit Accessory Protocol (HAP) is enabling hardware from different suppliers involved in home automation to communicate with Apple products (iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch) via a single, consistent, complete platform. This is done via wireless technologies like Bluetooth® Low Energy technology, as well as IP connectivity. The list of different ‘behaviors’ covered by the HomeKit hardware and software technology is extensive. Selecting a playlist for the audio system, turning on the lights in a particular room, remotely starting up home appliances (such as a washer/dryer), adjusting the heating and cooling, and activating the door entry system are just a few examples. But, because all of these functions are controlled via the Apple Home app or by asking Siri (rather than multiple apps), they can now work in tandem. For instance, settings can be configured so that if the curtains in a room were drawn, then the lighting would simultaneously turn on, or the ambient lighting could be changed to fit a certain music playlist.
Marvell is placing itself at the forefront of next generation smart home development through its support of Apple HomeKit. Our family of wireless SoC devices was the first in the industry to secure certification for the original HAP specification three years ago and has consistently been at the forefront as evidenced with our latest HomeKit Accessory Protocol Release 9 (HAP R9) specification. The low power 88MW30x ICs each possess an integrated microcontroller with Cortex®-M4 processing core, plus single-band IEEE 802.11n Wi-Fi® functionality. The truly transformational change this time is our SoCs’ certification for iCloud implementation, which enables remote control of HomeKit compliant devices using voice as well as the HomeKit App using iCloud® remote access. This means that OEMs serving the home automation market will be able to make their systems much more streamlined and convenient to seamlessly implement through iCloud. As a result, new use cases are now possible. For example, you can remotely start your thermostat to heat or cool your home using the Apple Home app (or Siri® voice control) while you are still on your way home from work and have the right temperature set for when you arrive.
This technology is showcased in the Marvell® EZ-Connect® HAP software development kit (SDK), which is designed to facilitate the implementation of HomeKit-enabled home automation accessories - accelerating our OEM customers’ design cycles and allowing products to be brought to market more quickly. Complementing its 802.11n wireless connectivity, the incorporated bridging functionality also allows interfacing with equipment using other RF protocols like Bluetooth low energy technology. For example, Marvell has partnered with a leading Bluetooth low energy vendor to offer a combo module reference design that is commercially available today through one of our module vendor partners, Azurewave. Our emphasis on security, encryption and memory partitioning allows secure, over-the-air firmware upgrades so that customer applications can run securely from external Flash memory while being encrypted on the fly. Our SDK also supports Amazon’s popular AWS cloud platform and Google’s Weave/Cloud as alternatives. To accompany the SDK, Marvell intends to provide OEMs with all the collateral necessary to get their products through the HomeKit certification process as rapidly and painlessly as possible and into the market quickly. Useful project examples are also provided.
Marvell understands how crucially important a robust software solution is to enable a hassle free home automation user experience and has developed industry leading software capabilities in support of Apple HomeKit. This has allowed us to get ahead of the game.
By Prabhu Loganathan, Senior Director of Marketing for Connectivity Business Unit, Marvell
This is the second instalment in a series of blogs covering the history of Wi-Fi®. While the first part looked at the origins of Wi-Fi, this part will look at how the technology has progressed to the high speed connection we know today.
Wireless Revolution
By the early years of the new millennium, Wi-Fi quickly had started to gain widespread popularity, as the benefits of wireless connectivity became clear. Hotspots began popping up at coffee shops, airports and hotels as businesses and consumers started to realize the potential for Wi-Fi to enable early forms of what we now know as mobile computing. Home users, many of whom were starting to get broadband Internet, were able to easily share their connections throughout the house.
Thanks to the IEEE® 802.11 working group's efforts, a proprietary wireless protocol that was originally designed simply for connecting cash registers (see previous blog) had become the basis for a wireless networking standard that was changing the whole fabric of society.
Improving Speeds
The advent of 802.11b, in 1999, set the stage for Wi-Fi mass adoption. Its cheaper price point made it accessible for consumers, and its 11 Mbit/s speeds made it fast enough to replace wired Ethernet connections for enterprise users. Driven by the broadband internet explosion in the early years post 2000, 802.11b became a great success. Both consumers and businesses found wireless was a great way to easily share the newfound high speed connections that DSL, cable and other broadband technologies gave them.
As broadband speeds became the norm, consumer's computer usage habits changed accordingly. Higher bandwidth applications such as music/movie sharing and streaming audio started to see increasing popularity within the consumer space.
Meanwhile, in the enterprise market, wireless had even greater speed demands to contend with, as it was competing with fast local networking over Ethernet. Business use cases (such as VoIP, file sharing and printer sharing, as well as desktop virtualization) needed to work seamlessly if wireless was to be adopted.
Even in the early 2000's, the speed that 802.11b could support was far from cutting edge. On the wired side of things, 10/100 Ethernet was already a widespread standard. At 100 Mbit/s, it was almost 10 times faster than 802.11b's nominal 11 Mbit/s speed. 802.11b's protocol overhead meant that, in fact, maximum theoretical speeds were 5.9 Mbit/s. In practice though, as 802.11b used the increasingly popular 2.4 GHz band, speeds proved to be lower than that still. Interference from microwave ovens, cordless phones and other consumer electronics, meant that real world speeds often didn't reach the 5.9 Mbit/s mark (sometimes not even close).
802.11g
To address speed concerns, in 2003 the IEEE 802.11 working group came out with 802.11g. Though 802.11g would use the 2.4 GHz frequency band just like 802.11b, it was able to achieve speeds of up to 54 Mbit/s. Even after speed decreases due to protocol overhead, its theoretical maximum of 31.4 Mbit/s was enough bandwidth to accommodate increasingly fast household broadband speeds.
Actually 802.11g was not the first 802.11 wireless standard to achieve 54 Mbit/s. That crown goes to 802.11a, which had done it back in 1999. However, 802.11a used a separate 5.8 GHz frequency to achieve its fast speeds. While 5.8 GHz had the benefit of less radio interference from consumer electronics, it also meant incompatibility with 802.11b. That fact, along with more expensive equipment, meant that 802.11a was only ever popular within the business market segment and never saw proliferation into the higher volume domestic/consumer arena.
By using 2.4 GHz to reach 54 Mbit/s, 802.11g was able to achieve high speeds while retaining full backwards compatibility with 802.11b. This was crucial, as 802.11b had already established itself as the main wireless standard for consumer devices by this point. Its backwards compatibility, along with cheaper hardware compared to 802.11a, were big selling points, and 802.11g soon became the new, faster wireless standard for consumer and, increasingly, even business related applications.
802.11n
Introduced in 2009, 802.11n made further speed improvements upon 802.11g and 802.11a. Operating on either 2.4 GHz or 5.8 GHz frequency bands (though not simultaneously), 802.11n improved transfer efficiency through frame aggregation, and also introduced optional MIMO and 40 Hz channels - double the channel width of 802.11g.
802.11n offered significantly faster network speeds. At the low end, if it was operating in the same type of single antenna, 20 Hz channel width configuration as an 802.11g network, the 802.11n network could achieve 72 Mbit/s. If, in addition, the double width 40 Hz channel was used, with multiple antennas, then data rates could be much faster - up to 600 Mbit/s (for a four antenna configuration).
The third and final blog in this series will take us right up to the modern day and will also look at the potential of Wi-Fi in the future.
By Michael Zimmerman, Vice President and General Manager, CSIBU, Marvell
At last week’s 2017 OCP U.S. Summit, it was impossible to miss the buzz and activity happening at Marvell’s booth. Taking our mantra #MarvellOnTheMove to heart, the team worked tirelessly throughout the week to present and demo Marvell’s vision for the future of the data center, which came to fruition with the launch of our newest Prestera® PX Passive Intelligent Port Extender (PIPE) family.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves… Marvell kicked off OCP with two speaking sessions from its leading technologists. Yaniv Kopelman, Networking CTO of the Networking Group, presented "Extending the Lifecycle of 3.2T Switches,” a discussion on the concept of port extender technology and how to apply it to future data center architecture. Michael Zimmerman, vice president and general manager of the Networking Group, then spoke on "Modular Networking" and teased Marvell's first modular solution based on port extender technology.
Throughout the show, customers, media and attendees visited Marvell’s booth to see our breakthrough innovations that are leading the disaggregation of the cloud network infrastructure industry. These products included:
We’re especially excited to introduce our PIPE solution on the heels of OCP because of the dramatic impact we anticipate it will have on the data center…
Until now, data centers with 10GbE and 25GbE port speeds have been challenged with achieving lower operating expense (OPEX) and capital expenditure (CAPEX) costs as their bandwidth needs increase. As the industry’s first purpose-built port extender supporting the IEEE 802.1BR standard, Marvell’s PIPE solution is a revolutionary approach that makes it possible to deploy ToR switches at half the power and cost of a traditional Ethernet switch.
Marvell’s PIPE solution enables data centers to be architected with a very simple, low-cost, low-power port extender in place of a traditional ToR switch, pushing the heavy switching functionality upstream. As the industry today transitions from 10GbE to 25GbE and from 40GbE to 100GbE port speeds, data centers are also in need of a modular building block to bridge the variety of current and next-generation port speeds. Marvell’s PIPE family provides a flexible and scalable solution to simplify and accelerate such transitions, offering multiple configuration options of Ethernet connectivity for a range of port speeds and port densities.
Amidst all of the announcements, speaking sessions and demos, our very own George Hervey, principal architect, also sat down with Semiconductor Engineering’s Ed Sperling for a Tech Talk. In the white board session, George discussed the power efficiency of networking in the enterprise and how costs can be saved by rightsizing Ethernet equipment.
The 2017 OCP U.S. Summit was filled with activity for Marvell, and we can’t wait to see how our customers benefit from our suite of data center solutions. In the meantime, we’re here to help with all of your data center needs, questions and concerns as we watch the industry evolve.
What were some of your OCP highlights? Did you get a chance to stop by the Marvell booth at the show? Tweet us at @marvellsemi to let us know, and check out all of the activity from last week. We want to hear from you!
By Alex Tan, Director, Automotive Solutions Group, Marvell
When you sit in a car today, the focal point of the interior is likely an infotainment system. From displaying vehicle diagnostics to parking assistance to enabling multimedia streaming and additional controls such as phone calls, navigation, etc., the infotainment system has become the touchpoint of the in-vehicle connectivity experience.
In order for drivers to take full advantage of these advanced features, internal vehicle data networks need to provide high bandwidth and seamless connectivity so these technologies can effectively communicate with each other. However, with multiple in-vehicle systems using different interfaces and connectivity technologies, how can we bridge the communication to get them to speak the same language?
The IEEE’s Ethernet standards act as the connectivity backbone to seamlessly link the different domains of the car such as infotainment and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Marvell is proud to have played an instrumental role in the development of the IEEE 802.3bp 1000BASE-T1 PHY standard which enables data between in-vehicle systems to be distributed over a flexible, low cost and high bandwidth network. In October 2015, Marvell introduced the 88Q2112 automotive Ethernet physical layer (PHY) transceiver, the industry’s first 1000BASE-T1 automotive Ethernet PHY transceiver based on the IEEE’s draft 1000BASE-T1 spec. Leveraging our advanced wireless and Ethernet technology solutions, the 1000BASE-T1 solution supports uncompressed HD video, ideal for distributing camera and sensor data in ADAS applications. In the infotainment space, gigabit Ethernet over a single unshielded twisted pair copper cable is a logical solution for transporting audio, video and voice data at a higher data rate and resolution. Marvell’s 88Q2112 PHY transceiver enables automakers to use one Ethernet switch to connect the multiple advanced features of tomorrow’s cars. Furthering our commitment to automotive innovation, in April 2016 we opened the Marvell Automotive Center of Excellence (ACE), a first-of-its-kind automotive networking technology development center. Located in Ettlingen, Germany, ACE aims to expand development and education efforts to advance the architecture of future connected, intelligent cars.
We showcased Marvell’s advanced auto connectivity solutions at the 2016 IEEE-SA Ethernet & IP @ Automotive Technology Day (E&IP@ATD) in Paris this past September, demonstrating how our technology supports multiple HD video streams with up to 4K resolution. Covering the exciting activities at E&IP@ATD, Tadashi Nezu of Nikkei wrote about our automotive connectivity leadership, noting that Marvell is rapidly coming to the forefront of the market. Nezu also lauded the Company for its early Ethernet development efforts, noting how Marvell quickly developed a solution compliant to the draft IEEE 802.3bp 1000BASE-T1 standard, before the specifications were even finalized.
Earlier this month, we presented our solutions at the heart of the world’s automotive development at the 3rd annual Automotive Ethernet Congress in Munich. Manfred Kunz, head of development at the ACE, spoke about automotive Ethernet security, while Christopher Mash, senior manager of automotive system architecture and field applications, co-presented with Bosch and Continental who shared their experience with the new 1000BASE-T1 technology. We showcased several automotive Ethernet solutions across nine customer booths, including the world’s first 1000Base-T1 Automotive Ethernet system, industry-leading intelligent security on the new 88Q5050 switch and a new platform demonstrating Marvell’s 10Gb capability for automotive.
The event was a success, drawing over 700 attendees, as well as speakers and exhibitors from over 20 countries. Automotive Ethernet Congress, Munich, Germany.
As automotive technological developments continue to advance rapidly and data continues to play a fundamental role in advancing the future of connected cars, we look forward to continue innovating and collaborating with our auto partners to further accelerate car connectivity.
With Super Bowl Sunday just around the corner, we’re reminded of last year’s game that took place just a few blocks away from Marvell’s campus in the heart of Silicon Valley. Taking inspiration from the locale, Super Bowl 50 was undoubtedly the most tech-savvy event to date. The Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers played at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, one of the most technologically advanced venues in the country and the first stadium to feature 40 gigabits per second of internet capacity. TechRepublic reported that there were 10.15 terabytes of data transferred across the network during the game, with cloud storage, social networking and web surfing accounting for the top three applications transferring data on Levi’s Wi-Fi network. What was even more impressive was Levi Stadium’s mobile app which enabled attendees to order food and beverages in advance, find the shortest bathroom and concession lines and access game highlights in high-definition.
But where does the game go from here? With sports fans being more engaged and connected than ever, how can technology continue enhancing the fan experience for Super Bowl 51?
NRG Stadium, Houston, TX Source: Wikipedia
This year, the mobile app worth cheering for is Fox Sports Go. For fans unable to watch the New England Patriots and Atlanta Falcons face off live in Houston on Sunday, they can still get up close to the game in virtual reality. Fox Sports will stream the game live on its app which can be viewed in VR using a Samsung Gear headset or Google Cardboard. The app’s “virtual suite” will offer viewers various viewpoints of the game – even those without a VR headset can experience the game in 360-degree video.
However, we can’t forget that for many viewers, the Super Bowl commercials are just as entertaining as the game itself. With the price of a 30-second ad reaching nearly $5 million this year, brands are, more than ever, using this opportunity to release some of the funniest, strangest and powerful ads to meet viewers’ high expectations. This Sunday, we’re especially looking forward to the technology commercials, such as the Kia Niro and Ford “Go Further” ads, which will highlight advancements in connected car technology. As consumers become increasingly interested in automotive technology, we can expect to see more Super Bowl commercials highlighting data and connectivity both this year and in the years to come.
Last year’s record-breaking data usage is just an example of how important Wi-Fi and connectivity have become in our fast-paced world, especially at events such as the Super Bowl where instant streaming and sharing play an essential role in the viewers’ experience. At last year’s game, 15.9 terabytes of data were transferred via Distributed Antenna System, which was 2.5 times the amount compared to the Super Bowl the year before. Will the record to be broken again this Sunday?
As we tune in to the biggest TV event of the year, we look forward to seeing how technology will up the ante at Super Bowl 51, from the amount of data being transferred to fans sharing their experience on social media, it’s sure to be a touchdown performance!
You can follow Sander Arts on Twitter @Sander1Arts
Before Silicon Valley became synonymous with high-tech and innovation, it was known as the “Valley of Heart’s Delight.” This expansive piece of land boasting acres of orchards just south of San Francisco would grow to become the future home to some of the world’s most innovative tech companies. Looking back at the area’s history, it’s no surprise that it would someday inspire a culture where groundbreaking tech comes to life in a garage, college dorm room or even at a kitchen table. The story of Silicon Valley itself begins in a garage, with two Stanford grads William Hewlett and David Packard, who would later found Hewlett-Packard in 1939. Throughout the next decade, entrepreneurs and scientists would come to the Santa Clara Valley to explore radio, military and electronic technology, laying the groundwork for the future hotbed of innovation. By 1953 notable tech companies began to officially establish ground in Santa Clara Valley with property in Stanford Industrial Park, closely followed by the area’s first semi company in 1956. With the Space Race in full force throughout the 1960s, the country experienced a heightened focus on the need for advanced silicon technologies and the valley began to take shape as the country’s hub for advanced high tech. Due to the sheer number of silicon companies in the park and growing attention on the semi industry, the area was officially coined “Silicon Valley” in an Electronic News series published in 1971.
Over the next 30 years, some of the world’s most groundbreaking technology companies would make their way to Silicon Valley. Marvell officially became a part of the phenomenon in 1995, right in the middle of the dot.com bubble. Since then, we’ve seen firsthand how the tech scene has grown exponentially through innovation and entrepreneurship. The startup mentality that originated in 1939 and which continues to boom in the 21st century inspires us to continue improving, innovating and challenging technology of today. At Marvell, we are confident in our vision for the future of silicon, data and cloud technologies and look forward to being a part of the next generation of great entrepreneurs, thinkers and tinkerers in Silicon Valley.
By Jawad Haider, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Wireless Connectivity Business Unit, Marvell
As chips are becoming smaller and more powerful, the wireless audio market is continuing to rapidly grow. According to MarketsandMarkets, the wireless audio industry is expected to reach $54.07 billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 23.2 percent between 2016 and 2022. High performance, low power wireless and Bluetooth/ Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) solutions have been key enablers of the growth of wireless audio, providing the technology for companies to develop connected audio solutions that have the throughput and range needed for high-resolution wireless, integrated with the extended battery life consumers expect for portable devices.
Multi-channel and multi-room wireless audio solutions are two key trends that have seen an increase in consumer adoption. However, to enable consumers to seamlessly stream their favorite tunes throughout their homes, there are a few key technological challenges with range and synchronization that must be addressed.
Marvell’s newest Avastar® wireless connectivity solutions make range limitations a thing of the past for many home and enterprise audio applications. Marvell’s high performance and low power Avastar combos incorporate Dynamic Multi-Hop Relay (DMHR) Technology to connect up to 15 devices in a daisy-chain fashion, extending the range of traditional Wi-Fi networks 15 times from 40m to almost 600m in a typical home. Additionally, Marvell has enabled other exciting features, such as connecting up to 31 clients to a speaker or sound bar which acts as a soft access point. Diagram showing a daisy-chain wireless audio setup
To make every microsecond of audio count, Marvell’s Avastar solutions provide cutting-edge audio synchronization across devices and rooms. Combining Marvell’s advanced Wi-Fi technology, support for the 802.11mc standard, and hardware time-stamping synchronization algorithms developed by our partners, Avastar delivers best-in-class smart connected solutions.
Another key trend in the wireless audio space, is the emergence of voice assisted products like Amazon Echo and Google Home. Marvell is working closely with all voice-enabled ecosystems to be at the forefront of technology enablement for this new category of products.
From portable speakers to advanced soundbar systems, Marvell’s advanced wireless technology is embedded in many of the most popular audio products on the market today. To learn more about Marvell’s wireless solutions, please visit: www.marvell.com/wireless. You can also read more about wireless trends and standards in my Q&A with Electronic Design’s Bill Wong http://electronicdesign.com/wifi/qa-what-s-new-wireless-audio-market.
We are only a couple of weeks into the New Year and already have a glimpse of how the industry will take shape in 2017 and beyond. It has been a ritual for the Marvell team, and most major players in the technology ecosystem, to start the first week of the year showcasing the cutting-edge solutions of today and tomorrow at CES. This year, the Las Vegas expo floor showed us that everyday objects, as well as cars, are getting smarter and are taking on new capabilities, signaling new demands for the industry to address.
Say “Hello” to the Car of the Future
The race to fully autonomous cars continues with new automotive tech ranging from improved sensors for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) to new displays and infotainment systems. Automakers introduced the integration of cloud-based voice assistants, which is bound to revolutionize the way we will interact with our cars.
Virtual Reality Wants to Get Real
Virtual reality (VR) developers focused on creating better content and tools to bring VR to the mainstream. Companies shared plans for gesture tracking and untethered headsets to deliver immersive experiences for gaming, entertainment and enterprise applications. In the near future, we can expect access to more VR, augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) content and experiences, such as shopping in virtual retail stores.
The AI of Everything
While automotive tech and VR continued to have a big presence at CES like in past years, artificial intelligence (AI) was one of the stars of the show. We saw more devices—beyond robots and smartphones—touting AI capabilities as automakers and home appliance manufacturers showcased exciting voice control integrations in cars, fridges, washing machines, TVs and more.
Amid all of the hype around the technologies that took center stage at this year’s CES, it was clear that data remains at the heart of our connected world. With advancements in connectivity comes the explosion of digital traffic as data is created, accessed, stored and moved to the cloud by billions of connected devices, appliances, cars, enterprises and more. Autonomous cars, VR and AI all depend on high bandwidth video and data to deliver smart and seamless experiences for consumers. At CES Marvell demonstrated how we are enabling the ecosystem to overcome its toughest data storage and network bandwidth challenges with our advanced solutions for the cloud, automotive, industrial, enterprise and consumer markets. Our automotive Ethernet physical layer (PHY) transceiver provides the robust 1000BASE-T1 connectivity needed to distribute data between the multiple advanced in-vehicle systems of tomorrow’s cars.
As data is moved and stored from consumer devices to the cloud, data centers can take advantage of our support for a range of Ethernet technology speeds for even greater accessibility, including our Prestera® switches, Alaska® Ethernet transceivers and ARMADA® 64-bit ARM-based modular SoC families for 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), 25 GbE and 40 GbE. We also demonstrated at CES our recently announced 25GbE end-to-end data center solution which underscores our commitment to delivering high performance, cost-effective and energy-efficient computing solutions to keep up with today’s increasing bandwidth demands.
What we saw at CES validates the work we do at Marvell, providing industry-leading solutions that help our customers move and store data fast, securely, reliably and efficiently across a wide range of applications, systems and platforms. For whatever new demands and challenges the market brings in 2017, Marvell is on the Move. We are only a couple of weeks into the New Year and already have a glimpse of how the industry will take shape in 2017 and beyond. It has been a ritual for the Marvell team, and most major players in the technology ecosystem, to start the first week of the year showcasing the cutting-edge solutions of today and tomorrow at CES. This year, the Las Vegas expo floor showed us that everyday objects, as well as cars, are getting smarter and are taking on new capabilities, signaling new demands for the industry to address.
Say “Hello” to the Car of the Future
The race to fully autonomous cars continues with new automotive tech ranging from improved sensors for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) to new displays and infotainment systems. Automakers introduced the integration of cloud-based voice assistants, which is bound to revolutionize the way we will interact with our cars.
Virtual Reality Wants to Get Real
Virtual reality (VR) developers focused on creating better content and tools to bring VR to the mainstream. Companies shared plans for gesture tracking and untethered headsets to deliver immersive experiences for gaming, entertainment and enterprise applications. In the near future, we can expect access to more VR, augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) content and experiences, such as shopping in virtual retail stores.
We pride ourselves on delivering innovative solutions to help our global customers store, move and access data—fast, securely, reliably and efficiently. Underscoring our commitment to innovation, we were named one of the Top 100 Global Innovators by Clarivate Analytics for the fifth consecutive year. In further recognition of our world-class technology, we are excited to share that The Linley Group, one of the most prominent semiconductor analyst firms, has selected Marvell’s ARMADA® SP (storage processor) as the Best Embedded Processor in its 2016 Analysts' Choice Awards.
Honoring the best and the brightest in semiconductor technology, the Analysts' Choice Awards recognize the solutions that deliver superior power, performance, features and pricing for their respective end applications and markets. The Linley Group awarded this prestigious accolade to Marvell for its ARMADA SP and recognized the solution’s high level of integration, high performance and low-power operation.
Marvell’s ARMADA SP is optimized for the rapid development of high-efficiency and high-density storage solutions for the enterprise and data center markets. With a highly integrated, scalable and flexible architecture, the ARMADA SP incorporates state-of-the-art interfaces and acceleration engines for advanced data processing capabilities, and to support TCO-minded hyperscale environments.
To learn more about Marvell’s SP solution, visit: http://www.marvell.com/storage/armada-sp/.
By Kelvin Vivian, Director of Intellectual Property, Marvell
Innovation is the lifeblood of any technology organization. Markets change overnight – if you stand still you fall behind, become irrelevant and soon cease to exist. This is what makes Silicon Valley exciting and scary at the same time.
Products change over time, but one thing Marvell has remained constant with is our commitment to innovation. That’s why we are so honored to be recognized this week as one of the Top 100 Global Innovators by Clarivate Analytics, formerly the Intellectual Property and Science business of Thomson Reuters. This is the fifth year Marvell has made this global “Who’s Who” list of innovators, and that’s thanks to every one of our 5,000 employees who put their ideas, energy and ingenuity to work here every day.
The award is based in part on global reach -- we hold more than 9,000 patents worldwide -- grant success rates and influence, and it serves as a testament to Marvell’s culture of innovation and commitment to providing differentiated, breakthrough technology solutions.
“Skate to where the puck is going, not where it’s been.”
-- Wayne Gretzky
We do a lot to promote the great products we bring to market, but what doesn’t get said is how much work our engineers do with partners, standards committees, and in end markets to understand where markets are going, and how we can help our customers differentiate their solutions from the competition.
A great example is our pioneering work in automotive Ethernet. This innovation has been five years in the making, but because we understood autonomous driving would become a reality, we were able to work with standards groups and auto suppliers to create a new way to move sensor data throughout a car. As a result, we can provide the interoperability, performance, and scalability mainstream auto manufacturers need to build autonomous cars. Uber and others talk about creating fleets of driverless cars – with Marvell’s technology, it’s now possible.
This is just one of the many innovative ideas born inside Marvell. As you can imagine, there are thousands of others. By giving our employees the freedom to explore, fail and persevere, we generate not only the patents but the products that keep us one step ahead in the market.
If this sounds like a place where you want to work, check out our careers page.
On Thanksgiving morning, over 560 Marvell employees woke up bright and early to join their families, friends and colleagues at the 12th annual Silicon Valley Turkey Trot. Despite the chilly morning, we kept warm with our matching gear and Turkey hats. We even had time between races to take pictures at our photo booth and share pictures and videos on Instagram and Twitter.
As you may know, the Turkey Trot is a celebrated Thanksgiving Day tradition here in Silicon Valley. In fact, with over 28,000 people registered, it’s the largest turkey trot in the United States. Organized by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group Foundation, the event has raised over $5.9 million for local charities since its inception, including Healthier Kids Foundation Santa Clara County, Housing Trust Silicon Valley and Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties.
This year, Marvell sponsored the Fittest Firm corporate registration drive and took home the winning title with the most employee registrations in the “Large Company” category of the competition. Our CEO Matt Murphy, an avid runner, also participated with his wife and kids. In an interview with Queenie Wong of The Mercury News, Matt shared his perspective on the importance of being active, saying that he’s “a big believer in wellness and fitness in the workplace and the correlation between your performance at work and your mental and physical well-being.” We know firsthand that balance is key, and had a wonderful time giving back to our community while getting some healthy exercise before our Thanksgiving feasts.
Silicon Valley Leadership Group
Another event that Marvell was thrilled to have the opportunity to be part of this month was the Silicon Valley Leadership Group Young Men’s Leadership Summit. The Summit aims to engage underserved middle school students with career planning and mentorship, while highlighting STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education. Two of our very own employees, Kelvin Vivian and John Ma, participated in the event as mentors. They spent the day engaging with students, sharing their own stories and helping lead the STEM activity portion of the program.
The day itself was filled with excitement and curiosity. After an aerodynamics lesson, the students and their mentors were given a set of materials with the task of working together to build a plane. The lesson ended with a friendly flight competition. The goal of the event was to introduce students to possible futures in both leadership and STEM, inspiring them to see the many possibilities across a wide range of careers. We had a blast spending the day with these brilliant young minds and it was inspiring to be a part of this event.
We’re always excited about opportunities for Marvell employees to give back and share their unique and diverse passions, whether they’re technology, engineering or running. That’s why it’s important to us to continually support the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, as well as other organizations with initiatives that truly align with Marvell’s core values. We’re happy and thankful to be part of a community that regularly brings local tech companies together to contribute to a greater cause.
By michael wu, Sales VP and China General Manager, Marvell
Marvell is honored to be a recipient of Huawei’s Joint Innovation Award 2016. Our partnership with Huawei focuses on bringing innovative networking solutions to market that enable advanced connectivity and infrastructure. Marvell’s Prestera® DX switch and Alaska® Ethernet transceiver product families are designed to power the industry’s next-generation enterprises and data centers with high-performance, feature-rich switching devices. Our President and CEO, Matt Murphy, accepted the prestigious award on behalf of the company during an exclusive, formal ceremony hosted by Huawei in Shenzhen, China. We thank, Huawei, for this recognition and look forward to our continued collaboration.
By Donna Yasay, VP of Worldwide Business Development, Marvell
You’ve seen it, the dreaded buffering while trying to stream a movie, lag times while gaming or dropped signals as you walk through your home. In fact, you probably know exactly where the dead zones are in your house. But all this is a thing of the past with the latest products based on Marvell’s Gigabit Home Networking (G.hn) Powerline Communications technology. Marvell G.hn chip sets combine powerline, coax, phone line/twisted pair and optical fiber in a single technology, which can turn a home’s electrical, coaxial and anywire smart grids into high-speed internet and connected devices.
Take for example the new line of ARRIS routers and extenders, the SURFboard® family of home networking devices with RipCurrent™ G.hn technology. This new system of routers and extenders, based on Marvell technology, is designed to eliminate the frustrations that have plagued home wireless as more and more family members use more and more devices. The RipCurrent-enabled routers and extenders use existing powerlines (electrical outlets) in the home to create new hotspots to connect high-bandwidth devices and relieve home Wi-Fi congestion.
ARRIS SURFboard is an easy-to-set up device that can bring gigabit speeds to every room, not just the room nearest to the router. That means ultrafast Wi-Fi in any room, sharing one internet connection. Range is no longer an issue and interruptions become non-existent. Now, mom can binge-watch her favorite program, while the teens are gaming or streaming, without suffering the dreaded buffering lag times. (Where’s dad? He’s shopping the internet for more cool devices.)
And while ARRIS International plc was the top cable modem retailer in 2016, they aren’t the only ones where Marvell G.hn Powerline is playing an integral role. Last summer, Comtrend, a leading designer and manufacturer of broadband communication equipment, launched its first G.hn powerline-only adapter in retail. G.hn offers the flexibility of providing high bandwidth for in-home networking using both a wired medium and wireless extender setting. Offering full home connectivity at 1 Gbps and 2 Gbps PHY rates, Marvell G.hn chipsets represent an ideal solution for wireline distribution of bandwidth-intensive and real-time applications like HD-IPTV, VoIP, gaming, video surveillance, multi-room DVR and more. The new 2Gbps chipset offers support for the new ITU-T G.hn 200MHz channel bandwidth, allowing for higher data transmission rates through the multitude of supported connections that G.hn already offers. Marvell’s 2 Gbps G.hn chipsets will enable vendors to build a new generation of solutions for wired IPTV delivery and 802.11ac extenders that will double the throughput and increase the range of existing products.
With no more dead zones, Marvell G.hn powerline technology is helping redefine home networking and improving the home Wi-Fi experience.
By Hunglin Hsu, Vice President, Digital IC Design, Marvell
With newer, bigger programs and more apps multitasking simultaneously, the answer to making any system run faster, from handheld to super computer, was always just to add more DRAM. . . and more, and more and more. Well, those days will soon be “memory” with Marvell’s introduction of Final-Level Cache™ (FLC™). FLC is an architecture that redefines memory on everything from data centers to wearables. By offloading the storage of programs to less expensive solid-state drives (SSDs) and only using a small amount of expensive DRAM to cache the active processes, the amount of DRAM can be cut dramatically along with power consumption. FLC has the potential to spark the development of a new class of lower-cost and lower- power products and cut the DRAM needed in a system by as much as 10x, while cutting the energy consumed to about half what is used today. How? If you look at what’s actually being used on your computer or portable device, only a small percentage of the application code loaded into the main memory is usually active. Take a look for yourself. For example, look at the process monitor in Windows task manager. You will see that most of the applications are idle, yet in aggregate require a significant amount of DRAM space. In fact, nearly 90 to 99 percent of most DRAMs are idle. By using a special algorithm, Marvell FLC can put the most frequently used programs on a small amount of DRAM and the rest onto less expensive, energy-efficient flash memory that can reduce the size, cost and power requirements of anything from a smart car, to mobile phones, tablets, smart watches, computers or data centers.
And it works! Our engineering mobile phone platform, shown in this video, uses FLC to play back video smoothly, without any lag or stutter. App switching is also zippy. Such performance is common on mid- or even high-end phones with large DRAM, yet this design used only 768MB of DRAM in the implementation. Time-sensitive streams are mapped to a 512MB non-cacheable area, while another 256 DRAM is used in FLC to emulate 1GB of memory. Hence, it provides similar performance to 1.5GB of main memory in traditional DRAM-based designs. FLC can also emulate larger quantities of main memory. The second proof of concept demonstrates smooth video performance on the same mobile phone platform using FLC.
With FLC, better performance can be achieved by reporting to the operating system a larger than physically implemented main memory. The operating system is thus less likely to kill background apps, which is why the fast app switching is possible. The FLC hardware does all the heavy lifting in the background and frees up the tasks of the operating system.
Smaller DRAM means less power and lower cost creating endless new possibilities. It will free up innovation in digital design and even accelerate categories like the Internet of Things (IoT.) By offloading storage to cheaper SSD memory, the world can also dramatically reduce overall power consumption and energy needs. For example, a 50 percent reduction in all computer energy use equates to a two percent decrease in rural power needs. Battery life of laptops will be increased, as well as IoT devices that could last weeks before recharging. It changes the future of supercomputers as well. With FLC, you can replace an entire server room with a small portable device. Super computing and computational sets will become faster and more efficient, with future super computers containing tens of terabytes of memory instead of hundreds of gigabytes. Data center space savings and cooling costs will also be dramatically reduced.
This is why Marvell Final-Level Cache represents a monumental technical step forward. Marvell FLC will not only redefine memory--but all of computing.
See Marvell FLC in action in the following proof of concept videos:
By Zining Wu, Ph.D., Chief Technology Officer, Marvell
Marvell Named a 2015 Top 100 Global Innovative Company by Thomson Reuters
Marvell was recently recognized as one of Thompson Reuters’ Top 100 Global Innovative Companies. Thomson Reuters is a leading source of news throughout the world and annually honors the top 100 corporations and institutions globally that are at the heart of innovation as measured by a series of proprietary patent-related metrics. According to Basil Moftah, president of Thomson Reuters Intellectual Property and Science, Thomson Reuters does not just want to recognize companies with ideas, but individuals and organizations “that harness the power and insight to bring ideas to life . . . businesses that make discoveries a reality.” Marvell has made the list for the fourth consecutive year and here’s why:
Innovation at Marvell Starts at the Top
With nearly 6,000 patents, Marvell prides itself on a culture of innovation—which, starts at the top. Marvell Chairman, CEO and Co-founder, Sehat Sutardja, Ph.D., himself has been awarded more than 360 patents. His passion for innovation permeates throughout the company. He fosters a climate for building, inventing and designing ICs and systems that push technology boundaries and help move the industry forward. This allows us to bring new electronic systems and devices to market that ultimately improve the lives of consumers around the world.
A very recent example is the patent awarded on Nov. 10 to Marvell for the Final-Level Cache (FLC™) technology developed by Sehat. In general, the FLC architecture replaces a conventional DRAM main memory in a system with a high-speed DRAM cache and a solid-state drive (SSD) main memory. The high speed DRAM cache within the FLC architecture generally has a storage capacity that is much larger than the storage capacity of caches typically associated with a processor. For example, the high-speed DRAM cache can have 1GB to 4GB of storage capacity for mobile phone applications, 4GB to 32GB of storage capacity for personal computer applications, and 32GB to 1 TB of storage capacity for server applications. Various other aspects of the FLC architecture combine to reduce the required storage capability of DRAM within a system, while maximizing memory access rates and minimizing power consumption. FLC technology can be incorporated into almost all computing devices including smartphones, tablets, laptops, servers, wearables, Internet of Things and storage devices.
As the industry faces critical crossroads in design due to ever-changing market demands and a world in desperate need of methods that reduce energy consumption, Marvell’s FLC and MOdular CHip (MoChi™) architectures are poised to change the way next-generation electronic devices and semiconductors are designed and built. Both architectures represent radical departures from the current convention and offer a means to drastically reduce system cost and power consumption of devices to enable affordable devices for the masses.
Ideas Are Encouraged at All Levels
While it starts at the top, innovation is a core value at Marvell - and the heart of innovation at Marvell lies with its people. While we pride ourselves on bringing together world-class engineering with extensive expertise in the areas of mixed-signal circuit design, digital signal processing, embedded microprocessors, CMOS technology and system-level architecture, we encourage ideas at all levels of the organization. Our Marvell program includes a process and support for the filing of patents; and we have education and training throughout the year to raise awareness and encourage contributions from all our employees as well as patent awards to honor our employees’ successes.
Formula for Success
The Thomson Reuters formula identifies companies around the world that are discovering new inventions and is based on four principle criteria: overall patent volume, patent application-to-grant success rate, global reach of the portfolio and patent influence as evidenced by citations.
Every patent starts with an idea. By keeping innovation at the heart of the company and making significant investments in R&D, Marvell has made this prestigious list four years in a row. Everyone at Marvell contributes to innovation. Whether it’s those that support the design teams, those that interface and get input from the customers or the legal teams that protect our patents—everyone at Marvell has a hand in this award, which makes us extremely proud at all levels of the organization.
By Jawad Haider, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Wireless Connectivity Business Unit, Marvell
Have you ever been in a situation where you went out with your family or group of friends/colleagues to a crowded venue (think picnic, movies, trade show, shopping mall) and you ended up getting separated? You tried calling and texting each other, but the network was congested. You even thought of sharing your location via WhatsApp, but there wasn’t an Internet connection for that to happen! You couldn’t help feeling, “If only wireless connectivity could be easier!”
The new Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Wi-Fi Aware™, announced July 14 by the Wi-Fi Alliance, has a solution for that problem. Mobile devices are about to become truly “local” and “social.” What that means is that all mobile devices which are Wi-Fi Aware-capable will be able to discover each other and initiate “interactions” with each other in a pure peer-to-peer fashion. By interactions, I mean services and applications that we already use today on our phones like social networking, gaming, maps, VOIP chat, targeted ads and coupons. All these applications today need some form of Internet connectivity in order to run. Wi-Fi Aware provides for a mechanism for users to initiate interactions with people and services in their “proximity” without the need to be connected to a Wireless Access Point. Common examples might include friend-finder, social gaming, walkie-talkie or a product locater inside a marketplace. Wi-Fi CERTIFIED WI-FI Aware is a new certification program for a new capability of Wi-Fi previously known as “Neighbor Awareness Networking” (NAN). Wi-Fi Aware enables a unique peer-to-peer technology that does not require real-time connection to a Wi-Fi infrastructure, server, GPS or other geo-location, but instead uses direct device-to-device Wi-Fi to discover and exchange information. It enables devices to discover nearby information and services before even making a connection. Wi-Fi Aware makes social/local/mobile applications more useful and personalized, and works well in crowded environments. It is designed for power efficiency.
Marvell demonstrated sample NAN capabilities earlier this year at Mobile World Congress. The demo was used in the context of a navigation application, which traditionally has huge challenges operating indoors. Using two Marvell-powered smartphones, one user could discover his nearby colleague and use the mapping application via a Wi-Fi Direct connection to navigate right to him.
Wi-Fi™ Aware extends Wi-Fi’s capabilities with a real-time, energy-efficient discovery mechanism that will allow a multitude of proximity-based applications. The Marvell Avastar family of wireless connectivity chipsets supports the Wi-Fi Alliance NAN Specification and we hope to be Wi-Fi Aware-certified soon. In fact, Marvell’s recently announced Avastar Marvell 88W8997 chipset already supports the industry’s most advanced connectivity feature sets including 802.11mc, an IEEE standard for precise indoor location; BLE Angle of Arrival/Angle of Departure based on Bluetooth SIG standards and Multi-User MIMO for robust wireless connectivity. These advanced features, combined with Wi-Fi Aware, will allow our customers to build exciting new products and enable application developers to add a whole new dimension to how mobile devices interact with each other. This will open the door to truly Social & Local mobile applications. So with the new Wi-Fi Aware, if you aren’t sure where you want to go next, I’m sure there will be an app right around the corner that will help you.
By Rachel Bennett, Kinoma Marketing Communications Director, Marvell
Innovators descended on Austin, TX for the latest in technology, media, science, and education. The Kinoma team took to the SXSW trade show with a booth that invited all attendees to “Start Making.” Kinoma Create, the JavaScript-powered IoT construction kit, was enthusiastically received.
Everyone who came through understood that Kinoma Create is an ideal platform for prototyping IoT products. The tradeshow was also an opportunity to connect in person with the early adopters who supported our Indiegogo campaign (kicked off at last year’s SXSW).
Internet of Things more of a ‘thing’ this year
Kinoma Create is today’s ideal IoT construction kit. An overwhelming impression from this year’s event is that the IoT is vastly more recognized now as a concept, and an opportunity to make our world smarter and more efficient. JavaScript as the language of IoT has been our passionate position from the start. The importance of this, too, was clearly more understood year-over-year.
The Kinoma Create demos were the focus of our booth, and they illustrated the various ways connected devices could be programmed, built and managed. Everything from NFC, CoAP, beacons, sensors, and ZigBee were used to connect and control robots, security systems, home automation, games, and more. Visits by luminaries of tech
We were delighted to give a tour of Kinoma Create to Megan Smith, United States Chief Technology Officer and Assistant to the President. She’s having a great influence on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Writer, speaker, futurist, design instructor, and SXSW regular Bruce Sterling stopped by our booth, taking in all the demos.
Austin, stay weird!
We will definitely be back to Austin for SXSW 2016. In the meantime, please connect with us at other upcoming conferences and trade shows in the remainder of this year.
By Michael Zimmerman, Vice President and General Manager, CSIBU, Marvell
Marvell was recently recognized by Juniper Networks with a Supplier of the Year Award for “End-to-End Supplier Quality.” The award is given to the strategic vendor who demonstrates the highest levels of consistency in delivery, response time to changes in demand, and quality of product delivered. Juniper presented the award to Marvell on February 26 at Juniper’s Supplier Summit, held at the company’s headquarters in Sunnyvale.
L-R in the picture: Marty Garvin (SVP Global Supplier Management, Juniper), Robyn Denholm (EVP, Chief Financial and Operations Officer, Juniper), Rami Rahim (CEO, Juniper), Michael Zimmerman (Marvell VP-GM CSIBU), Sean Keohane (VP Sales, Marvell), Steve Dansey (VP Business Operations CSIBU, Marvell)
Highest performance, lowest power, smallest footprint, most efficient solutions…
This is the constant mantra at Marvell when designing our state-of-the-art system-on-chips (SOCs), regardless of the product category. In this case, highest performance, low power, small footprint and most efficient solutions have resulted in the Marvell 88PA6120 - an ink, thermal and color laser multifunction printer SoC that Prinics has selected for its newest mobile thermal photo printer dubbed the “best picture kit in my hand.” The new Prinics PicKit M1, a handheld battery powered photo printer, is an example of a brand new fun device. The PicKit M1 is extremely easy to use thanks to the integration of NFC and WiFi direct. Touch any NFC enabled phone to the printer and it will launch the intuitive PicKit app and establish a WiFi direct connection. No NFC? No problem! Simply launch the app manually. From the app you can select from any of the pictures on the phone and print. A minute later you have a high quality 2.1”x 3.4” photo the share with friends. There is nothing like the joy of holding a real photo in your hand!
Whether at the highest end of performance, middle- or low-end of a product class, Marvell’s family of printing SoCs seek to drive down cost and improve performance of existing or new product categories. And not just at the SoC level. We don’t stop at a diverse product line and broad range of print solutions; we offer the most complete software-development kit (SDK) and solutions for traditional ink/laser/thermal and dye-sub printers, as well as for mobile and 3D printing. For example, the Marvell SDK allows OEMs faster time-to-market. Reference designs allow OEMs to capitalize on other Marvell high-performance, low-power product lines such as the Marvell Avastar™ 88W8782, a highly integrated wireless local area network (WLAN) SoC, that gives consumers highly convenient wireless print options using Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, and Mopria™ Print Service for Android devices or Wi-Fi local printing. Plus, Marvell’s strong cryptography and tamper protection schemes offer security and protect consumables from counterfeiting.
Here’s how Marvell’s latest high-end printing SoC delivers on best-in-class performance, footprint and cost. The Marvell 88PA6120 system-on-a-chip (SoC), offers unmatched integration, I/O connectivity and performance for traditional printing and 3D printing solutions. It combines powerful processing with a host of I/O capability and dedicated imaging hardware acceleration to deliver high performance and excellent image quality. It integrates a powerful 533MHz ARM v7-compatible processor to handle all the application processing requirements. Its super-integrated design lowers the solution part count to achieve lower cost. Marvell solutions are also highly configurable enabling a single SOC to support a wide range of ink and laser printers, MFP’s, and 3D printers.
It’s no wonder Marvell is the world’s number one supplier of printer SoCs, and the Prinics PicKit shows that there is still more innovation and growth to come in the printer market. And at Marvell, we will continue our mantra to keep at developing higher-performance, lower power, smaller footprint, lower cost SoCs.
Marvell was awarded the prestigious Outstanding Leadership and Contribution Award from Wi-Fi Alliance® for the sixth consecutive year.
The Wi-Fi Alliance is a worldwide network of companies that brings you Wi-Fi® and whose shared vision is to connect everyone and everything, everywhere. The members of this collaboration forum come from across the Wi-Fi ecosystem. The Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ seal of approval designates products with proven interoperability, industry-standard security protections and the latest technology. Wi-Fi Alliance has certified more than 23,000 products, delivering the best user experience and encouraging the expanded use of Wi-Fi products and services in new and established markets, which is why billions of devices today work interactively throughout the world today.
“This annual award was given to Marvell because of its strong contributions to the Wi-Fi industry through leadership in Wi-Fi Alliance initiatives,” said Edgar Figueroa, President and Chief Executive Officer, of the Wi-Fi Alliance. “This year marks Marvell’s sixth sequential recognition, underscoring the company’s ongoing commitment and participation in Wi-Fi Alliance technology certification and development activities.”
Marvell’s innovative Wi-Fi technology is a key foundation of its end-to-end “Smart Life and Smart Lifestyle” solutions including Internet of Things (IoT), Kinoma Create, Kinoma Connect software, 4G LTE mobile solutions, mobile storage, and other industry-leading products.
With Marvell’s portfolio of advanced wireless technology and integrated security, we help make sure your calls and digital entertainment activities don’t get dropped or intercepted.
Essentially, Marvell continues its involvement, award or no award, with the Wi-Fi alliance because we believe in the mission, and it provides the underlying technology that allows people to do great things -- fun things -- with their mobile devices. Whether it’s social media or socializing -- like sending selfies -- we want to do our part to ensure that today’s mobile to digital entertainment devices to tomorrow’s Internet of Things (IoT) work and work well together. That’s why Marvell keeps pushing forward, not only with its technology, but also addresses obstacles at an industry level, so users can seamlessly enjoy their technology devices.
The Linley Group has announced the winners of its annual Analysts’ Choice Awards, and we are thrilled to share the news that the Marvell Prestera® 98DX4251 has been selected as the Best Networking Chip of 2014. The Marvell Prestera 98DX4251 is our next-generation packet processor designed to enable performance- and cost-optimized solutions for a broad range of platforms in the service provider and campus environments.
Bob Wheeler, Principal Analyst, Networking at The Linley Group shared his thoughts with us on our award win, “We selected Marvell’s Prestera 98DX4251 packet processor as the Best Networking Chip because its feature set advanced the state-of-the-art for Carrier Ethernet aggregation switches. By offering five levels of carrier-class hierarchical QoS along with virtualization and tunneling capabilities, the 98DX4251 enables delivery of highly differentiated services in the access and aggregation layers of next-generation networks.”
The Linley Group Analysts’ Choice Awards recognize the top semiconductor products of 2014 in seven categories: PC/server processors, mobile processors, embedded processors, processor-IP cores, networking chips, mobile chips, and best technology. The team of technology analysts from The Linley Group evaluate the merits of the leading products based on the combined impact of performance, power, features and cost of each device for a given end system and market. You can read more about the 2014 Awards winners here.
We thank The Linley Group for honoring us with this award and recognizing the contributions of leading processor offerings in powering innovative capabilities for the industry.
By Rachel Bennett, Kinoma Marketing Communications Director, Marvell
Kinoma Create officially launched on October 21st with a week of activities: conferences, public speaking, exhibiting, and celebrating. It was the culmination of months of listening to early adopters, iterating the product, priming the pump with industry event participation, refining the development tools, and building out the developer support system.
When you have the backing of enthusiastic crowdfunders, and you’re as committed to completely rethinking product prototyping as we are, it’s a labor of love.
IOTAconf
We kicked off launch week with participation in IOTAconf at Moscone Center in San Francisco. Our booth was popular with attendees excited to apply their JavaScript skills for a better way to experiment in hardware.
Andy Carle, Kinoma Create product lead, delivered a talk titled, “Mind the Gap: JavaScript for IoT, from Concept to Production.” IOTAconf attendees joined this session to get inspired by prototyping and design iteration, and to learn how JavaScript is taking its rightful place as a programming language for IoT product development.
Gigaom Structure Connect
Over at the Mission Bay Conference Center, the team launched Kinoma Create as part of Gigaom Structure Connect. Peter Hoddie took to the main stage to share our firsthand “How We Built It” experience, focusing on the critical prototyping phase of creating a product. Our talk was foreshadowed in a by-lined article penned for Gigaom’s editorial site. Marvell was a proud sponsor of Garage@Connect, a program within the event that showcased startup companies and their very new product concepts. As part of this, Peter introduced Garage@Connect to attendees, encouraging them to consider the garage–a storied place of tech innovation–as a state of mind rather than a physical location.
Throughout the event, we were able to talk one-on-one with attendees who visited our table. Many were interested in Kinoma Create as a product from Marvell, offering them a path from prototype to mass production. The launch of Kinoma Create also got the attention of the media, and we were able to conduct several press interviews while at the event.
Gigaom Structure Connect was a valued opportunity to connect directly with those interested in a complete re-think of IoT product prototyping. We closed out the event by participating on a panel with other speakers.
Kinoma Create Cake
Topping off a very active launch week, we held a little celebration with the wider Marvell team that in various ways contributed to the making of Kinoma Create.
And what better way to celebrate than with a cake that looked exactly like the device?
By Gaurav Shah, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, MultiMedia Solutions & IoT BU
With football and the fall TV season upon us, TV is on a lot of people’s minds right now as they wait for their favorite shows to start again. But what do service providers and multiple system operators (MSOs) have in store for users, and what technology will be driving the newest TV trends next fall, or the fall season after that?
One of the big trends is Ultra HD or 4K TV platforms. According to CNET’s definition, Ultra HD is resolution greater than HD, which today most commonly means a horizontal resolution of 3,840 and a vertical resolution of 2,160. This is four times the resolution of 1080p, which is 1,920x1,080. Officially, Ultra HD is a minimum of 3,820x2,160, also known as Quad HD. It also includes cinema 4K (4,096x2,160) and future resolutions like "8K," or 7,680x 4,320.
The value and the quality of Ultra HD will be most noticeable on TVs with screen sizes larger than 50 inches. According to Business Insider (Sept. 2, 2014), it is predicted that 4K-capable TVs will be in 10 percent of all North American households by year-end 2018. In Fact, there are some companies, especially TV OEMs, who feel that their mix of UHD vs FHD, will be tilted in favor of UHD, as early as 2018.
In addition to the bigger screens and higher 4K Ultra-HD resolution, the push for content over open platforms is expected to continue to gain momentum, much like what was seen in the smart phone market. Just like Android has tilted the percentages to twice that of the proprietary smart phones, Android TV could also see the same growth, or even dominance, as users move to more Over the Top (OTT) programming, such as from Netflix or Hulu, instead of or in addition to, their traditional and paid TV viewing. Business Insider, in the same Sept. 2 report, indeed predicts that the first wave of 4K content will become available on streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Instant and YouTube, but also looks at how cable and traditional TV broadcasters will adopt the new format, as well as the obstacles they face as broadcasters. Starting Oct 12, 2014, Netflix member’s access to Ultra HD now requires a "platinum" plan, which costs $11.99 per month. This 4K service only functions with TVs that support the UHD HEVC format. Android TV will also bring in the capability of allowing the content they desire on their phones or in their homes.
This is where platform companies, like Marvell, push the technology limits, so service providers and MSOs can offer innovative and compelling viewing offerings. Marvell was an early proponent in the development and evangelization of the Android TV platform, and recently introduced at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam its innovative new ARMADA™ 1500 PRO quad-core 4 Ultra HD SoC (88DE3214.) This sophisticated Ultra HD SoC delivers demand-based performance and leverages know-how from Marvell’s expertise in mobile platforms to enable Service Operators to offer cost-effective and elegant form factor devices to the consumer.
Marvell not only addresses the higher resolution with 60 frame-per-second 10-bit HEVC video decode, but has up to 12K DMIPs Quad Core ARM CPUs, so operators can deploy rich media/web-based TV applications. There’s also a multi-core GPU with 8 shader Vivante GC3000 to enable a compelling UI and provide the requisite horsepower for console-class gaming apps. The robust features of the ARMADA 1500 PRO platform truly provide an immersive gaming and digital content experience and enable converged LiveTV, OTT and gaming.
In addition, Marvell has also addressed another key element: Security. Marvell’s SoCs for consumer platforms, such as Set-top boxes, Digital TVs, Dongles, etc., have always placed a huge emphasis on security. Content is and always will be king, and the protection of that content is of paramount importance. With the imminent deployment, and eventual proliferation, of Ultra HD content, Marvell teamed with Verimatrix to bring premium content security with support for video watermarking (VCAS) to a new breed of STB platforms that mix OTT, IP and broadcast services alongside entertainment-centric TV applications. With Marvell’s ARMADA 1500 PRO 4K enhanced security engine with TrustZone® support, Marvell offers a robust secure processor with Trusted Rendering Path to meet the strict and evolving guidelines for premium content.
It is no wonder that Bouygues Telecom, a full-service electronic communications operators, in partnership with Marvell, announced a 4K version of their Android “Miami” TV box. As a result, Bouygues Telecom customers will get to enjoy unequalled image quality in 4K, as soon as compatible content is released in French offers.
While this season’s Fall TV schedule is upon us, you can see the landscape for even more exciting things to come are already on the horizon. Marvell is excited to be at the technology forefront of “must-see” TV.
By Lance Zheng, Director Product Marketing, IoT Business Unit, Marvell
Imagine a house whose lighting anticipates your mood. Not a morning person? No problem. Your lighting will be set to a dimmed setting in the morning and gradually increase brightness over time to wake you naturally, like a sunrise. As your day continues, lights go out in rooms that aren’t used, saving on your energy bill. Starting a movie? Lights go out, automatically. Having a party? Set your theme for outdoors, perhaps orange for Halloween or green and red for Christmas. Coming home from work, your lights will sense the presence of your smart phone down the street, and turn on the outdoor lights to light your way. Indoor lights go on as needed for your safety and convenience. Finishing your day, lights will turn off automatically, no getting up to turn off a light you forgot about. Want to program your lights before vacation to make it look like you are at home? Or turn them off remotely because you can’t remember if you turned off all the lights? All of this can happen when lighting becomes part of the Internet of Things (IoT).
And these ideas are in not the future — they are a reality now. For example:
GE Link—GE, a founding partner of the Quirky and Wink initiatives to build a smarter home, announced their smartest bulb in the box in June called Link. Link is a new and affordable connected LED bulb that lets consumers remotely control their home lighting from anywhere in the world and sync it with other connected devices. Enabled by their new Wink app, Link eliminates the need for expensive add-ons typically associated with connected devices. GE’s Link LED lights come in three form factors, A19, BR30 and PAR38, and are being sold at Home Depot for as low as $15. Considering LED light bulbs last 50 times longer than an incandescent, use less energy and don’t need to be replaced for up to 15 years, the prices are already reasonable. The HUB plus 2 GE Link 60W-equivalent soft white (2700K) A19 connected home LED light bulbs are currently priced at $49.94.
Osram Lightify — Lightify, by Osram Sylvania, displayed at Light+Build 2014 its host of solutions and products that provide a wide range of lighting possibilities using an app on a smartphone or tablet. Lightify works with other installed lighting systems from manufacturers that support the common ZigBee Light Link standard or Home Automation standard. Lightify enables living rooms, workrooms, as well as balconies or gardens, to be bathed in a wide variety of light atmospheres, which can be scheduled or controlled from a smartphone or tablet. This allows more dynamic flexibility to throw off burglars or to adjust for the seasons versus standard time clock devices. OSRAM began selling these products Sept. 1 in major European retail stores and online.
Belkin WeMo — Belkin announced its smart lamp developed on its WeMo ecosystem at the Consumer Electronics Show this year. The WeMo Smart LED Bulbs are warm, bright light bulbs similar to traditional 60-watt incandescent, yet only consume 10 watts of energy and produce very little heat. These bulbs help reduce the amount of energy used and decrease cooling costs. It has a life expectancy of up to 23 years (based on three hours of daily usage.) The WeMo LED Lighting Starter Set lets users access and control WeMo Smart LED Bulbs from anywhere, using an existing home Wi-Fi network and mobile Internet. Users can dim lights, turn them on or off, or create a custom schedule. WeMo Link even allows users to connect up to 50 Smart LED Bulbs and control them individually or as a group. The Belkin WeMo LED Lighting Starter Set, containing two WeMo Smart Light Bulbs and WeMo Link to control multiple WeMo bulbs from anywhere and Wi-Fi enabled (F5Z0489) are currently being sold on Amazon at $99.99.
And what do all these products have in common? Marvell technology. Marvell is in a unique position as the only semiconductor supplier to offer a full end-to-end digital-connected lighting solution platform including LED controller chips, Zigbee microcontrollers, WiFi-ZigBee gateway solution and Kinoma UI software.
Marvell is staying on the leading edge of the technology by offering innovative LED driver technology, best-in-class ZigBee and WiFi microcontrollers and an end-to-end smart wireless platform built on top of these technologies. Marvell has also taken leadership in establishing ecosystem support for these products. Marvell has worked with manufacturing partners and system integrators, who provide software integration services, so that brand-name OEMs and retailers, can bring new and exciting lighting and home automation products to market, based on Marvell technology, more quickly.
Beyond connected lighting, the scalable platform also enables this same embedded technology to include sensors that can detect for example, open or closed windows and doors, motion activities throughout the house, water leakages and more, to give end users a lower cost security system that reports directly to mobile devices. Imagine a sensor technology that could also alert you if there’s a water leak anywhere in the house. (Because when does your hot water usually break? When you are on vacation!) These are just a few examples of how IoT is at work in lighting and home automation to add conveniences to your life - that you never knew you missed.
By Sue Kim, Director, Corporate Communications and PR, Marvell
On Tuesday, Sept. 2nd Marvell’s executive team traveled to New York to ring the NASDAQ opening bell in Times Square. Our President and Co-Founder, Weili Dai delivered a passionate opening statement about our continued commitment to innovating for the “Smart Life and Smart Lifestyle.” It was an exciting day for Marvell, and a chance for us to take a step back with our 7,000 employees worldwide and look at all we’ve accomplished since our founding in 1995. Following the ringing of the bell, Sehat Sutardja, Weili Dai, Sukhi Nagesh and Mike Rashkin met with main stream media resulting in the report titled, “Marvell Hopes to Ride LTE Wave, Beat Broadcom, and Scoop up the Storage Market.”
Over that past 2 decades, Marvell has grown to be a $3.4 billion company, with offices in the U.S., Asia and Europe. Our world-class engineering and mixed-signal semiconductor design expertise allows Marvell to deliver critical building blocks to its customers and give them a competitive edge to succeed in today’s dynamic market. Today, Marvell is a global leader in providing complete solutions from mobile communications to storage, cloud infrastructure, Internet of Things (IoT) and digital entertainment.
As an embedded technology company committed to making our customers successful, it was a wonderful milestone to kick off the trading day at NASDAQ. We invite you to click on this link to recapture the moment at http://www.nasdaq.com/reference/marketsite_events.stm and join us as we celebrate not only where we have been, but all the new and exciting products we will continue to innovate for the future.
By Philip Poulidis, Vice President and General Manager, IoT and Mobile Business Units, Marvell
In my last blog, we discussed what it will take to accelerate mass adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT). Now, I’m going to take it a step further and introduce the importance of making IoT more relevant versus absolute — more connected versus singular and utilitarian — “things” that can truly end up changing people’s lives or increasing productivity, versus done in isolation from the rest of the connected world.
It all starts with the enabling core technologies of adding embedded computing and connectivity to “things” — then you add sensor technology, near real-time computing, an expansive network, significant cloud data storage and analytics — but that alone does not fundamentally change core industries — from agriculture to manufacturing to consumer electronics, and more.
The catalyst for a truly connected and smart world comes with “the relative existence of things.” According to a Wikipedia definition:
If the existence of a substance becomes effective only with influences of other existences, that can be called a Relative Existence.
When something exists on its own, or without support of anything else, that can be called Absolute Existence.
For example, simply adding WiFi, Bluetooth or Zigbee to a light bulb, door lock, thermostat, soil moisture sensor or piece of machinery, may provide a single utility or benefit, but its existence will be Absolute. It will not be connected to the universe of connected things or other systems, and therefore will not provide the benefit of exponential compounding value.
Why is this important? Because that device would miss out on the power of geometric progression. Visualize this for a moment--if I were to take a piece of paper and tear it in two… and then if I were to place the two halves on top of each other… and then if I were to repeat the process… I would produce a stack of paper that is now four times the thickness of the original, correct?
Then, hypothetically speaking, if I were to repeat this process… say, just fifty times… do you know how tall this stack would be? The stack would be 112 million Km or 70 million miles high! That’s three quarters of the way to the Sun. This is the power of a geometric progression or compound growth. (It is generally believed that you can’t fold a piece of paper in half more than eight times. In reality, with a paper of infinite size and with infinite energy, it can be folded an infinite number of times. The problem is that if it’s folded just 103 times, the thickness will be larger than the observable Universe: 93 billion light-years! 1
This kind of compound growth can happen only when each node on a network is interacting with, learning from and being part of a much larger network of connected nodes – each new node building on the others. This is precisely what is needed in order to spur the mass adoption of IoT. Simply connecting devices to the Internet in order to interact with an App or a single business process is not enough to produce a compounding effect — it needs the Relative Existence of Things to make the profound impact needed to be industry-, or even life-changing.
There are a handful of companies today (and more that will emerge tomorrow) that have the power to almost immediately enable and bring to life this concept of a Relative Existence for the Connectivity of Everything, both for consumers and for industry. That short list of companies includes Apple, Google, Cisco, IBM, Blackberry, as well as Amazon and Facebook. Last time I mentioned the Apple Home Kit. Apple introduced HomeKit in iOS 8, a new framework that delivers a common protocol for simple set up and communication with devices in the home, including integration with Siri. Marvell’s IoT chipsets and EZ-Connect SDK now support HomeKit and makes integration easy for device manufacturers to add the ability for their customers to securely pair and control devices throughout the home.
Since that time, Google I/O Nest officially announced a new Google Nest developer program and API that will allow other companies' smart devices to communicate with Nest's Protect smoke alarm and Learning Thermostat. Many high-profile third-party developers, like Whirlpool, Whirlpool, Chamberlain, Jawbone and Mercedes-Benz, have already developed some very interesting use cases with these APIs. And while Apple and Google are focusing on consumer IoT applications, Blackberry’s new Project Ion, is focusing more on enterprise and industrial applications for IoT.
Leveraging the Blackberry Mobile Device Management platform, Ion’s goal is to give businesses and industry access to new kinds of insights that can be derived when every aspect of their business is a connected, data-gathering device. It will also enable relationship building between partners, carriers and app developers. Apple’s HomeKit, Google’s Nest Labs and Blackberry’s Project Ion, are all examples of platforms that are enabling the Relative Existence for connected things.
So revisiting our previous Absolute IoT example, when these companies engage a community of developers, and give access to the APIs for that door lock, thermostat, light bulb and garage door opener . . . it opens up a whole world of options brought on by relative and contextual possibilities. The “smart devices” in your home would react to events triggered by your actions. App developers, or device manufacturers, could create “scenes” and tie them into their products. For example, a car manufacturer could utilize geo-fencing algorithms, running as an App on the car’s OS, to turn on your home air conditioner if it “sensed” that you were returning home from work or errands, perhaps at the five-mile marker. As you got closer to your street, it could turn on the porch lights followed by the garage door once you were near your driveway. Then as you walk up to your front door, grocery bags in hand, your door would unlock, sensing the presence of your smartphone.
Therefore, by making a device Relative to the Existence of Things versus Absolute, triggering the compounding effect and geometric progression, we see how the relevance and impact of the Internet of Things is only made possible through The Relative Existence of Things to deliver an exciting new IoT world.
By Philip Poulidis, Vice President and General Manager, IoT and Mobile Business Units, Marvell
From thermostats to lighting, the Internet of Things (IoT) is already happening—it’s happening all around us—one “thing” at a time. But what will it take to accelerate to the mass adoption that Gartner projects will lead to 30 billion IoT units shipped by 2030?*
I believe that first and foremost, there must be a strong IoT ecosystem in place for mass adoption to accelerate. It will be the ecosystem that drives and shapes the industry for the developer community and the end user. In fact, the connected devices industry was just given a big boost recently with Apple's introduction of HomeKit in iOS 8. HomeKit is a new framework that delivers a common protocol for simple set up and communication with devices in the home, including integration with Siri.
Marvell recently unveiled a new wireless product family, the Marvell's EZ-Connect™ software platform, which features the Marvell® MW300 Wi-Fi microcontroller, the MB300 Bluetooth microcontroller, and the MZ100 ZigBee microcontroller. The Marvell MW300 now supports HomeKit and makes integration easy for device manufacturers to add the ability for their customers to securely pair and control devices throughout the home. Information about the Marvell MW300 is available now in this press release.
By delivering device components and software development kits, and making the interfaces available to developers with well-defined Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), OEMs can bring products to market more quickly, while the developer community has access to the interfaces needed to explore and develop every feature and function to create exciting and fun new user applications – both of which are highly essential to mass IoT adoption.
IoT delivers on the promise of a world of connected devices and connected people. It will make current devices smarter and provide a whole new way of interacting with newly created connected devices and applications.
* From the October 2013 Gartner report, “The Battle for the Internet of Things,” by Al Velosa, Gartner Research Director Semiconductors & Electronics.
Powered by the Marvell® Bravera™ SC5 controller, Memblaze developed the PBlaze 7 7940 GEN5 SSD family, delivering an impressive 2.5 times the performance and 1.5 times the power efficiency compared to conventional PCIe 4.0 SSDs and ~55/9us read/write latency1. This makes the SSD ideal for business-critical applications and high-performance workloads like machine learning and cloud computing. In addition, Memblaze utilized the innovative sustainability features of Marvell’s Bravera SC5 controllers for greater resource efficiency, reduced environmental impact and streamlined development efforts and inventory management.
HPE GreenLake for Block Storage powered by Alletra Storage MP
At this weeks’ Leading Lights Awards Ceremony, hosted by Light Reading, Editor-in-Chief Phil Harvey announced that the Marvell® Deneb™ Coherent Digital Signal Processor (CDSP) is the winner of the Most Innovative Service Provider Transport Solution category. This recognition is awarded to the optical systems vendor or optical components vendor providing the most innovative optical transport solution for service provider customers.
Marvell today announced that it has successfully completed its acquisition of Aquantia.
Monday, August 26, marked the anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment being signed into law and granting American women the constitutional right to vote. To commemorate the impending 100-year celebration, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group kicked off a series of organized events meant to honor women trailblazers and host a call to women leaders from all walks of life. Built into our core values around diversity and equality, empowering women to be leaders is important to Marvell and its executive leadership team, and the company was a proud sponsor of Monday’s event. 
These are in addition to enhanced DPDK performance (up to 36Mpps bi-directional) and support for SR-IOV, TCP/IP stateless offloads, IEEE 1588 time stamping and more.
Now it is not impossible to use RoCE at scale but to do so requires the implementation of additional traffic congestion control mechanisms, like Data Center Quantized Congestion Notification (DCQCN), which in turn calls for large, highly-experienced teams of network engineers and administrators. Though this is something that hyper-scale customers have access to, not all enterprise customers can say the same. Their human resources and financial budgets can be more limited. 
With RDMA-enabled adapters for HPE ProLiant, Apollo, HPE Synergy and HPE Cloudline servers, Marvell has a strong portfolio of 10Gb or 25GbE connectivity solutions for data centers. In addition to supporting low latency RDMA, these adapters are also NVMe-ready. This means they can accommodate NVMe over Ethernet fabrics running RoCE or iWARP, as well as supporting NVMe over TCP (with no RDMA). They are a great choice for future-proofing the data center today for the workloads of tomorrow. 
The consumer drone market has expanded greatly over the last few years, with almost 3 million units shipped during 2017. This upward trend is likely to continue. Analyst firm Statista forecasts that the commercial drone business will be worth $6.4 billion annually by 2020, while Global Market Insights has predicted that the worldwide drone market will grow to $17 billion (with the consumer category accounting for $9 billion of that). As new products are continually being introduced into what is already an acutely overcrowded marketplace, a differentiated offering is therefore critical to a successful product. 
out of the blue, which lead to mind blowing discoveries and achievements.
Key representatives of the global technology sector were gathered together at the San Jose Convention Center last week to hear the recipients of this year’s Annual Creativity in Electronics (ACE) Awards announced. This prestigious awards event, which is organized in conjunction with leading electronics engineering magazines EDN and EE Times, highlights the most innovative products announced in the last 12 months, as well as recognizing visionary executives and the most promising new start-ups. A panel made up of the editorial teams of these magazines, plus several highly respected independent judges, were all involved in the process of selecting the winner in each category. 
The 88NV1160 high performance controller for non-volatile memory express (NVMe), which was introduced by Marvell earlier this year, fought off tough competition from companies like Diodes Inc. and Cypress Semiconductor to win the coveted Logic/Interface/Memory category. Marvell gained two further nominations at the awards - with 98PX1012 Prestera PX Passive Intelligent Port Extender (PIPE) also being featured in the Logic/Interface/Memory category, while the 88W8987xA automotive wireless combo SoC was among those cited in the Automotive category. 
"We're excited to honor this robust group for their dedication to their craft and efforts in bettering the industry for years to come," said Nina Brown, Vice President of Events at UBM Americas. "The judging panel was given the difficult task of selecting winners from an incredibly talented group of finalists and we'd like to thank all of those participants for their amazing work and also honor their achievements. These awards aim to shine a light on the best in today's electronics realm and this group is the perfect example of excellence within both an important and complex industry." 
Marvell kicked off OCP with two speaking sessions from its leading technologists. Yaniv Kopelman, Networking CTO of the Networking Group, presented "Extending the Lifecycle of 3.2T Switches,” a discussion on the concept of port extender technology and how to apply it to future data center architecture. Michael Zimmerman, vice president and general manager of the Networking Group, then spoke on "Modular Networking" and teased Marvell's first modular solution based on port extender technology. 
Automotive Ethernet Congress, Munich, Germany.
NRG Stadium, Houston, TX
Looking back at the area’s history, it’s no surprise that it would someday inspire a culture where groundbreaking tech comes to life in a garage, college dorm room or even at a kitchen table. The story of Silicon Valley itself begins in a garage, with two Stanford grads William Hewlett and David Packard, who would later found Hewlett-Packard in 1939. Throughout the next decade, entrepreneurs and scientists would come to the Santa Clara Valley to explore radio, military and electronic technology, laying the groundwork for the future hotbed of innovation. 
By 1953 notable tech companies began to officially establish ground in Santa Clara Valley with property in Stanford Industrial Park, closely followed by the area’s first semi company in 1956. With the Space Race in full force throughout the 1960s, the country experienced a heightened focus on the need for advanced silicon technologies and the valley began to take shape as the country’s hub for advanced high tech. Due to the sheer number of silicon companies in the park and growing attention on the semi industry, the area was officially coined “Silicon Valley” in an Electronic News series published in 1971.
Diagram showing a daisy-chain wireless audio setup 
We are only a couple of weeks into the New Year and already have a glimpse of how the industry will take shape in 2017 and beyond. It has been a ritual for the Marvell team, and most major players in the technology ecosystem, to start the first week of the year showcasing the cutting-edge solutions of today and tomorrow at CES. This year, the Las Vegas expo floor showed us that everyday objects, as well as cars, are getting smarter and are taking on new capabilities, signaling new demands for the industry to address.
At CES Marvell demonstrated how we are enabling the ecosystem to overcome its toughest data storage and network bandwidth challenges with our advanced solutions for the cloud, automotive, industrial, enterprise and consumer markets. Our automotive Ethernet physical layer (PHY) transceiver provides the robust 1000BASE-T1 connectivity needed to distribute data between the multiple advanced in-vehicle systems of tomorrow’s cars. 
We pride ourselves on delivering innovative solutions to help our global customers store, move and access data—fast, securely, reliably and efficiently. Underscoring our commitment to innovation, we were named one of the Top 100 Global Innovators by Clarivate Analytics for the fifth consecutive year. In further recognition of our world-class technology, we are excited to share that The Linley Group, one of the most prominent semiconductor analyst firms, has selected Marvell’s ARMADA® SP (storage processor) as the Best Embedded Processor in its 2016 Analysts' Choice Awards. 
Innovation is the lifeblood of any technology organization. Markets change overnight – if you stand still you fall behind, become irrelevant and soon cease to exist. This is what makes Silicon Valley exciting and scary at the same time. 
G.hn offers the flexibility of providing high bandwidth for in-home networking using both a wired medium and wireless extender setting. Offering full home connectivity at 1 Gbps and 2 Gbps PHY rates, Marvell G.hn chipsets represent an ideal solution for wireline distribution of bandwidth-intensive and real-time applications like HD-IPTV, VoIP, gaming, video surveillance, multi-room DVR and more. The new 2Gbps chipset offers support for the new ITU-T G.hn 200MHz channel bandwidth, allowing for higher data transmission rates through the multitude of supported connections that G.hn already offers. Marvell’s 2 Gbps G.hn chipsets will enable vendors to build a new generation of solutions for wired IPTV delivery and 802.11ac extenders that will double the throughput and increase the range of existing products. 
How? If you look at what’s actually being used on your computer or portable device, only a small percentage of the application code loaded into the main memory is usually active. Take a look for yourself. For example, look at the process monitor in Windows task manager. You will see that most of the applications are idle, yet in aggregate require a significant amount of DRAM space. In fact, nearly 90 to 99 percent of most DRAMs are idle. By using a special algorithm, Marvell FLC can put the most frequently used programs on a small amount of DRAM and the rest onto less expensive, energy-efficient flash memory that can reduce the size, cost and power requirements of anything from a smart car, to mobile phones, tablets, smart watches, computers or data centers. 
Wi-Fi CERTIFIED WI-FI Aware is a new certification program for a new capability of Wi-Fi previously known as “Neighbor Awareness Networking” (NAN). Wi-Fi Aware enables a unique peer-to-peer technology that does not require real-time connection to a Wi-Fi infrastructure, server, GPS or other geo-location, but instead uses direct device-to-device Wi-Fi to discover and exchange information. It enables devices to discover nearby information and services before even making a connection. Wi-Fi Aware makes social/local/mobile applications more useful and personalized, and works well in crowded environments. It is designed for power efficiency.
Innovators descended on Austin, TX for the latest in technology, media, science, and education. The Kinoma team took to the SXSW trade show with a booth that invited all attendees to “Start Making.” Kinoma Create, the JavaScript-powered IoT construction kit, was enthusiastically received.
Visits by luminaries of tech
Marvell was recently recognized by Juniper Networks with a Supplier of the Year Award for “End-to-End Supplier Quality.” The award is given to the strategic vendor who demonstrates the highest levels of consistency in delivery, response time to changes in demand, and quality of product delivered. Juniper presented the award to Marvell on February 26 at Juniper’s Supplier Summit, held at the company’s headquarters in Sunnyvale. 
L-R in the picture: Marty Garvin (SVP Global Supplier Management, Juniper), Robyn Denholm (EVP, Chief Financial and Operations Officer, Juniper), Rami Rahim (CEO, Juniper), Michael Zimmerman (Marvell VP-GM CSIBU), Sean Keohane (VP Sales, Marvell), Steve Dansey (VP Business Operations CSIBU, Marvell)
The new Prinics PicKit M1, a handheld battery powered photo printer, is an example of a brand new fun device. The PicKit M1 is extremely easy to use thanks to the integration of NFC and WiFi direct. Touch any NFC enabled phone to the printer and it will launch the intuitive PicKit app and establish a WiFi direct connection. No NFC? No problem! Simply launch the app manually. From the app you can select from any of the pictures on the phone and print. A minute later you have a high quality 2.1”x 3.4” photo the share with friends. There is nothing like the joy of holding a real photo in your hand! 
The Linley Group has announced the winners of its annual Analysts’ Choice Awards, and we are thrilled to share the news that the Marvell Prestera® 98DX4251 has been selected as the Best Networking Chip of 2014. The Marvell Prestera 98DX4251 is our next-generation packet processor designed to enable performance- and cost-optimized solutions for a broad range of platforms in the service provider and campus environments. 
Marvell was a proud sponsor of Garage@Connect, a program within the event that showcased startup companies and their very new product concepts. As part of this, Peter introduced Garage@Connect to attendees, encouraging them to consider the garage–a storied place of tech innovation–as a state of mind rather than a physical location. 
The launch of Kinoma Create also got the attention of the media, and we were able to conduct several press interviews while at the event. 
With football and the fall TV season upon us, TV is on a lot of people’s minds right now as they wait for their favorite shows to start again. But what do service providers and multiple system operators (MSOs) have in store for users, and what technology will be driving the newest TV trends next fall, or the fall season after that? 
Imagine a house whose lighting anticipates your mood. Not a morning person? No problem. Your lighting will be set to a dimmed setting in the morning and gradually increase brightness over time to wake you naturally, like a sunrise. As your day continues, lights go out in rooms that aren’t used, saving on your energy bill. Starting a movie? Lights go out, automatically. Having a party? Set your theme for outdoors, perhaps orange for Halloween or green and red for Christmas. Coming home from work, your lights will sense the presence of your smart phone down the street, and turn on the outdoor lights to light your way. Indoor lights go on as needed for your safety and convenience. Finishing your day, lights will turn off automatically, no getting up to turn off a light you forgot about. Want to program your lights before vacation to make it look like you are at home? Or turn them off remotely because you can’t remember if you turned off all the lights? All of this can happen when lighting becomes part of the Internet of Things (IoT).
