Marvell Technology
More info
- Creator
- Sehat Sutardja, Weili Dai, Pantas Sutardja
- Released
- 1995
- Type
- Fabless semiconductor company
The chip company inside your hard drive, your SSD and your switch, even though nobody has ever bought a gadget because the box said Marvell.
Marvell was founded in 1995 by husband and wife Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai together with Pantas Sutardja. Its first big market was the read channel in hard drives — the signal processing that makes sense of faint magnetic signals — and from there it grew into storage controllers for SSDs, Ethernet chips and network processors. It owns no fabs; TSMC does the manufacturing.
In 2006 Marvell bought Intel's XScale business, an ARM-based processor line, and in 2018 the network-processor maker Cavium. Lately the weight has shifted to custom ASICs for data centres, where the cloud giants want their own chips but not their own chip departments. The main rival is Broadcom.