Marvell Technology Group
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Marvell Technology Group | |
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| Type | Public NASDAQ: MRVL |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1995 |
| Headquarters |  Santa Clara, California |
| Key people | Sehat Sutardja, Co-founder Weili Dai, Co-founder Pantas Sutardja, Co-founder |
| Industry | Semiconductors |
| Revenue | $1.67 billion USD (2006) |
| Employees | 3400 (2006) |
| Website | www.marvell.com |
Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL) is an American producer of storage, communications and consumer semiconductor products. Their products can be found in a range of applications:
- Consumer: Technologies include WLAN, 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 claims their products deliver the industry’s fastest data rates and lowest power requirements and enable customers to engineer high-volume products for both disk drive and network storage applications. Marvell designed the first Gigabit all-CMOS read channel, the first Gigabit-capable SOC and the first Serial ATA interface solution, enabling the Company to deliver SATA solutions to a wide variety of products and applications, from notebook and desktop PCs to enterprise-class storage systems.
Founded in 1995, Marvell has more than 3400 employees and continues to grow. Marvell has design centers in Aliso Viejo, Colorado, Maryland, 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.
Key Marvell partners include: Alcatel, Arima, Asus, Cisco Systems, Compal, D-Link, Elitegroup Computer Systems, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Gateway, Gigabyte Technology, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi, Huawei, Intel, Inventec, LG, Linksys, Lucent Technologies, Motorola, MSI, NEC, NETGEAR, Nokia, Nortel Networks, Panasonic, Quanta Computers, Samsung, Seagate, Toshiba, VTech and Western Digital.
[edit] Purchase of Intel's XScale Business
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 $600 million in cash and the assumption of unspecified liabilities. The acquisition was completed on November 9, 2006.
[edit] Marvell vs. Free software
In October 2006, Marvell came under attention for not releasing appropriate specifications of their hardware that would make it possible for the open source community to guarantee lifetime support of Marvell's wireless devices in the One Laptop Per Child programme. Marvell's strategy was highly disapproved by Richard Stallman of Free Software Foundation and Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD. As a result of previous policies and of this very encounter, Marvell is said to be a company with an unusually poor record of supporting free operating systems. [1] OTOH, Jim Getty, one of the principals of the OLPC project expresses that Marvell has acted in good faith in supporting the OLPC project. In fact, he states that Marvell has gone out of the way to support the project by having "significantly re-engineered their SD interface design we are using in the OLPC, at considerable expense, so that it would exactly conform to the SD Association’s SD HCI interface specification, so that we could have open documentation and use the standard SD driver."[2]
