MARVELL TECHNOLOGY GROUP

'Marvell' () is an American producer of storage, communications and consumer semiconductor products. Their products can be found in a range of applications:

★ 'Consumer:' Technologies include Wireless LAN, Voice over IP (VoIP), system controllers, power management, storage solutions and embedded CPUs.

★ 'Enterprise:' Marvell produces silicon solutions for Ethernet switching, routers and wireless networking. Marvell was the first to develop merchant Gigabit Ethernet switching solutions.

★ 'Storage:' Marvell designed the first Gigabit all-CMOS read channel, the first Gigabit-capable system-on-a-chip and the first Serial ATA interface solution. These products are found in both disk drive and network-attached storage applications.
Founded in 1995, Marvell currently has more than 5000 employees. Marvell has design centers in Aliso Viejo, Colorado, Massachusetts, San Diego and Santa Clara. Outside the US, Marvell has design centers in Germany, Israel, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan as well as numerous worldwide sales offices.

Contents

History

XScale

Controversy

Acquisitions

References

External links

History

XScale

On June 27, 2006, the sale of Intel's XScale assets was announced. Intel agreed to sell the XScale business to Marvell for an estimated USD 600 million in cash and the assumption of unspecified liabilities. The acquisition was completed on November 9, 2006.^[1]

Controversy

In October 2006, Marvell was criticized for failing to publicly provide specifications of their hardware in enough detail to support their wireless devices in the One Laptop Per Child program. Marvell was criticized by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation and Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD. ^[2]

Acquisitions

Through the years, Marvell has acquired smaller companies to enter new markets.

Date	Acquired company	Expertise	Cost
October 2000	Galileo Technology	Ethernet switches, system controllers	$2700M in stock
June 2002	SysKonnect	PC networking
February 2003	RADLAN	Embedded networking software	$49.7M
August 2005	Hard disk controller division of Qlogic		$180M in cash + $45M in stock
December 2005	SOC division of UTStarcom		$24M in cash
February 2006	Printer ASIC business of Avago		$240M in cash
February 2006	Xscale product line from Intel	Communications processors and SOCs	$600M in cash

References

1. Marvell buys Intel's handheld processor unit for 0 million
2. Making sense of the One Laptop Per Child proprietary software row Jem Matzan

External links

★ Official Homepage

★ Option Activity Alert: Marvell Technology Group (MRVL) Optionszone.com