What the two companies bring to the table
Marvell
I had the chance to talk last night with Marvell CEO Matt Murphy and optics leader Inphi CEO Dr. Ford Tamer on its deal valued at $10B, which considerably expands Marvell's market opportunity in the cloud data center and 5G end markets. Marvell has been growing incredibly over the past three years, which I documented here after its recent industry analyst conference. The company has focused and transformed itself into a data infrastructure leader with its storage and compute portfolio, and it also has a strong position in copper networking chips which are used in enterprise and automotive applications. Now, with the Inphi acquisition, Marvell will become a player in optical networking chips used in cloud data centers and wired and wireless carrier networks.
While many people are familiar with Marvell, I think less are familiar with Inphi. Inphi creates the electro-optics chips used by networking equipment makers to connect the massive racks of servers inside cloud data centers, and connect the data centers to one another. The same chips are also used to connect 5G base stations together and to the rest of the network. Consider the cloud giant's higher speed, lower latency, availability zones, or peering, which all require an ultra high-speed fiber optic connection. Additionally, consider connecting one server rack or fleet to another in the highest speed way possible. Inphi’s chips power those connections.
