Marvell agreed to acquire Avera Semiconductor, the ASIC business of GLOBALFOUNDRIES, for $650 million in cash at closing plus an additional $90 million in cash if certain business conditions are satisfied within the next 15 months.
Marvell said its ambition is to become the world’s leading supplier of infrastructure semiconductor solutions and that Avera’s ASIC capabilities will accelerate this transformation.
Avera, which was once part of IBM’s Microelectronics business, has been responsible for more than 2,000 complex designs in its 25-year history. The team brings design competencies in analog, mixed-signal and SoCs as well as a rich IP portfolio including high-speed SerDes, high-performance embedded memory and advanced packaging technology. Avera also has strong relationships with blue-chip wired and wireless networking OEMs, having delivered custom solutions for multiple generations of switches, routers and base stations. More recently, Avera has started to address emerging opportunities in next-generation cloud data centers with multiple programs in development.
Marvell's capabilities enable a wide range of digital processing including baseband, processors, Ethernet switches and PHYs. Marvell’s opportunity set has recently expanded to encompass a number of custom SoCs addressing a broader portion of the base station. Several of these new products are designed to replace FPGAs with purpose-built optimized silicon. At the same time, Avera has provided custom products to be deployed in the radio head of a leading wireless infrastructure OEM for multiple generations.
“Our acquisition of Avera enables us to offer the complete spectrum of product architectures spanning standard, semi-custom to full ASIC solutions,” said Matt Murphy, president and CEO of Marvell. “With their highly experienced design team and Marvell’s leading technology platform, we will be better positioned to capitalize on our expanding opportunity in wired and wireless infrastructure, starting immediately in the fast growing 5G base station market. In addition, we are looking forward to furthering our successful partnership with GLOBALFOUNDRIES in the coming years and beyond.”
“This transaction is another example of our commitment to focus on our core business of providing differentiated foundry offerings as a manufacturing service provider, while establishing deeper relationships with customers who are leaders in their respective sectors,” said Tom Caulfield, CEO at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. “With this deal and our growing strategic partnership with Marvell, we will forge new opportunities for the teams of both companies to leverage GF’s broad set of offerings and capitalize on the 5G infrastructure market as well as other opportunities. We look forward to becoming a strategic provider for Marvell for decades to come.”
Marvell to acquire Aquantia for multi-Gig Ethetnet
Aquantia, which is based in San Jose, California, specializes in Multi-Gig 2.5G/5G/10G Ethernet over copper products. Its portfolio automotive PHYs for in-vehicle Ethernet networks supporting level 4 and 5 autonomous driving.
Marvell said the acquisition complements its portfolio of copper and optical physical layer product, including its gigabit PHY and secure switch products."Our acquisition of Aquantia will fuel Marvell's leadership in the transformation of the in-car network to high-speed Ethernet over the next decade," said Matt Murphy, president and CEO of Marvell. "At the same time, Aquantia extends our reach in the rapidly emerging Multi-Gig segment of network infrastructure and creates a leading end-to-end Ethernet connectivity portfolio."
"Marvell and Aquantia share a vision where the network – whether in an autonomous vehicle, an enterprise application or in cloud infrastructure – can seamlessly power the data economy," said Faraj Aalaei, chairman and CEO of Aquantia. "This is a fantastic opportunity as our customers will benefit from Marvell's global scale and expanding footprint in Multi-Gig network applications."
The transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to Marvell's non-GAAP earnings per share and generate significant annual run-rate synergies of $40 million to be realized within 12 months after the transaction closes.
Marvell intros silicon for 5G infrastructure
Whereas initial deployments of 5G NR have been dominated by FPGA-based solutions, Marvell said its 5G solution encompasses baseband DSPs, Arm multi-core SoCs, purpose-built hardware accelerators, Ethernet connectivity engines and system-level security solutions.Marvell's 5G NR Platform includes:
- Radio Access SoCs: The OCTEON Fusion-M product line is optimized for cost/power and programmable with a 3GPP protocol stack split and massive MIMO capabilities. Marvell's SoCs set the performance benchmark for both LTE-A and 5G NR, with multiple deployments through key industry partners.
- Transport/EPC Core Processors: Multi-core OCTEON processors that are optimized to address the most demanding use cases of 5G NR. Marvell's scalable data-plane acceleration makes its embedded processors ideal for 5G Core/EPC applications at the heart of the network as well. Marvell uniquely offers a single unified architecture for both transport and EPC core.
- Ethernet Networking: switches and PHYs for carrier infrastructure. Marvell Prestera switches contain hierarchical traffic management for mobile infrastructure. In addition, Marvell's differentiated switching solutions allow advanced flow identification and access control to enable user-level security.
- Wi-Fi Connectivity: Marvell is ramping high volume production of 8x8 and 4x4 Wi-Fi 6 solutions. The 802.11ax engines include full MU-MIMO and OFDMA uplink and downlink, multi-gigabit peak speeds, precision location, cloud management, best-in-class beamforming and integrated Bluetooth 5 technology.
- ThunderX2 Arm-based Server: Marvell has introduced workload optimized ThunderX2 server processors to augment and enhance its 5G portfolio.
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