Marvell completes acquisition of Inphi

Marvell Technology completed its previously announced acquisition of Inphi Corporation.  The combination creates a U.S. semiconductor powerhouse positioned for end-to-end technology leadership in data infrastructure.

“I am excited to welcome the Inphi team to Marvell and look forward to realizing the tremendous value creation potential of this combination for our customers, employees and shareholders. Together we will have the portfolio, capabilities, and scale to expand Marvell’s leadership in its key growth end markets of 5G, Cloud and Automotive,” said Matt Murphy, president and CEO of Marvell. “I am also pleased that we are now organized as a U.S. company and we look forward to continuing to drive innovation in semiconductor technology critical to the nation’s data economy.”

Marvell also announced that Dr. Ford Tamer has been appointed to the Board of Directors of Marvell. Tamer served as Inphi’s President and Chief Executive Officer for more than nine years. Under Dr. Tamer’s stewardship, Inphi became the trusted market leader for electro-optics solutions for cloud and telecom operators, increasing revenue from these customers more than 20 times during his tenure, to an annual run rate of about $750 million. Prior to Inphi, Dr. Tamer served as CEO of Telegent Systems. Previous to this, he was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom’s Infrastructure Networking Group, which he grew 5-fold to $1.2 billion in revenue within five years. 

Marvell to acquire Inphi for optical components business

Thursday, October 29, 2020  400ZR, Data Centers, Inphi, Marvell, Optical, Silicon  

Marvell Technology Group Ltd. agreed to acquire Inphi Corp. in a cash and stock transaction valued at approximately US$10 billion, consisting of $66 in cash and 2.323 shares of stock of the combined company for each Inphi share. Upon closing of the transaction, Marvell shareholders will own approximately 83% of the combined company and Inphi stockholders will own approximately 17% of the combined company.

Inphi’s high-speed electro-optics target data centers as well as wired and wireless carrier networks. The product portfolio includes Inphi transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs); drivers for 100G to 600G coherent optics; optical PHYs for signal recovery, retiming, grooming, error correction and gearbox operations; its COLORZ transceivers based on silicon photonics for 80/120km DWDM connectivity in a QSFP28 form factor; and its Canopus coherent Digital Signal Processors (DSPs)

Marvell said that by combining its storage, networking, processor, and security portfolio with Inphi’s  electro-optics interconnect platform, the combined company will deliver end-to-end technology leadership in data infrastructure. 

“Our acquisition of Inphi will fuel Marvell’s leadership in the cloud and extend our 5G position over the next decade,” said Matt Murphy, president and CEO of Marvell. “Inphi’s technologies are at the heart of cloud data center networks and they continue to extend their leadership with innovative new products, including 400G data center interconnect optical modules, which leverage their unique silicon photonics and DSP technologies. We believe that Inphi’s growing presence with cloud customers will also lead to additional opportunities for Marvell’s DPU and ASIC products.”

“Marvell and Inphi share a vision to enable the world’s data infrastructure and we have both transformed our respective businesses to benefit from the strong secular growth expected in the cloud data center and 5G wireless markets” said Ford Tamer, President and CEO of Inphi. “Combining with Marvell significantly increases our scale, accelerates our access to the next generations of process technology, and opens up new opportunities in 5G connectivity.”

Marvell also stated that intends to reorganize the combined company so that it will be domiciled in the United States, creating a U.S. semiconductor powerhouse with an enterprise value of approximately $40 billion. Upon closing, Ford Tamer, Inphi’s President and CEO, will join Marvell’s Board of Directors.

https://www.marvell.com/announcements/marvell-to-acquire-inphi.html

• In 2016, Inphi acquired ClariPhy Communications, a provider of ultra-high-speed systems-on-chip (SoCs) for multi-terabit data, long haul and metro networking markets for $275 million in cash as well as the assumption of certain liabilities at the close. ClariPhy was one of the first merchant suppliers of coherent DSP technology. The company was based in Irvine, California.
• In 2014, Inphi acquired Cortina Systems' High-Speed Interconnect and Optical Transport product lines for $52.5 million in cash and $73.5 million in stock.  In 2006, Cortina Systems acquired the assets of Intel's optical network components business for $115 million. Cortina was based in Sunnyvale, California.

Marvell to acquire Avera Semi, the ASIC division of GLOBALFOUNDRIES

Monday, May 20, 2019  ASICs, Marvell, Mergers And Acquisitions  

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...

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Marvell announces first 112G 5nm SerDes

Tuesday, November 17, 2020  112G, Data Centers, Marvell, SerDes  

Marvell introduced the first 112G 5nm SerDes solution that has been validated in hardware. The company also confirmed that it has recently secured a new custom ASIC design win customer that will embed this new IP to build next generation top-of-rack (ToR) and spine switches for leading hyperscale data centers.The Marvell 5nm SerDes solution doubles the bandwidth of current systems based on 56G while enabling the deployment of 112G I/Os. The device...

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Microsoft to build its first datacenter region in Malaysia

Microsoft announced plans to build its data center region in Malaysia to deliver trusted cloud services locally, with world-class data security, privacy, and the ability to store data in-country.

Microsoft's “Bersama Malaysia” (Together with Malaysia) initiative represents "a significant commitment to empowering Malaysia’s inclusive digital economy and advancing the nation’s digital transformation across the private and public sectors." The company aims to deliver training to at least 1 million Malaysians by end of 2023 to help create economic opportunities for people and businesses in the digital era. Finally, Microsoft will help form the MyDigital Alliance Leadership Council to collaborate on cloud-first and digital-native policy recommendations.

YAB Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, Prime Minister of Malaysia said, “As we cement the Microsoft partnership today, I hope this is just the first green shoots of a broader meadow of investments in Malaysia, for Microsoft and other data players. This significant investment from Microsoft further fortifies Malaysia’s position as a potential regional data hub and we stand ever ready to welcome more such partners as we work with our stakeholders to continually improve Malaysia’s value proposition in this big data space.”

“Today’s announcement represents a major milestone for Microsoft in the 28 years we have been operating in Malaysia. We share the Government’s commitment that digital transformation must be inclusive and responsible. As such, we pledge to empower 1 million Malaysians with digital skills, helping them to take advantage of the opportunities this new investment will bring. Building digital infrastructure is fundamental to advancing a nation’s digital economy. The upcoming datacenter region will be a game-changer for Malaysia, enabling the government and businesses to reimagine and transform their operations, to the benefit of all citizens,” said Jean-Philippe Courtois, Executive Vice President and President, Microsoft Global Sales, Marketing and Operations.

https://news.microsoft.com/en-my/2021/04/19/microsoft-announces-plans-to-establish-its-first-datacenter-region-in-malaysia-as-part-of-bersama-malaysia-initiative-to-support-inclusive-economic-growth/

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Telxius activates Brazil - Argentina subsea cable

Telxius announced that the new Tannat submarine cable, connecting Santos (Brazil) with Las Toninas (Argentina), is now open for service. 

Tannat is a 2,000 kilometer new generation system adds to the Brusa and Junior cables on the Atlantic coast of Latin America to deliver the most modern and diverse end-to-end connectivity between the U.S., Brazil and Argentina. The new cable completes a main connectivity route between the U.S. and key hubs in South America as a continuation of Brusa (Virginia Beach – Rio de Janeiro) and Junior (Rio de Janeiro – Santos). Brusa has a capacity of 160 Tbps, with the highest capacity direct connection between the U.S. and South America and one of the highest in the world. Brusa connects Rio de Janeiro and Fortaleza in Brazil, San Juan in Puerto Rico and Virginia Beach, U.S. via an 11,000 km, ultra-low-latency submarine cable. SAm-1, the 25,000 km subsea cable ring that surrounds Latin America, provides additional route diversity. With the combination of these four cables, Telxius offers outstanding diverse and robust subsea network routes in Latin America.

“With the addition of Tannat to our subsea network in Latin America we have effectively established the most modern and diverse end-to-end connectivity route between Brazil, Argentina and the U.S.,” noted Pablo Fraguas, Sales VP, Southern Region of Telxius Cable. “This new route not only improves the quality of the available network connectivity within Latin America, it also provides a robust, low latency connection of these markets to the U.S. and beyond.”

Tannat, via Junior and Brusa, connects directly to the Virginia Beach Telxius CLS Campus featuring a direct backhaul to the world’s largest concentration of data centers in Ashburn, in the U.S. In addition, the Virginia Beach landing station provides direct access to the Marea and Dunant subsea cables, creating a global loop that connects South America, the U.S., Europe and beyond. This truly global connectivity is a direct representation of Telxius’ goal of delivering low latency, robust networks to content providers, global enterprise and third-party operators, enabling the advancement of the global economy.

https://telxius.com/en/telxius-to-provide-new-diverse-subsea-capacity-between-brazil-and-argentina-with-tannat/

Telxius' Mistral cable lands in Peru

Wednesday, March 17, 2021  Peru, Subsea, Telxius  

Telxius confirmed that its South Pacific Submarine Cable (SPSC) or ‘Mistral’ cable has landed in Peru.

The Mistral project, carried out jointly by Claro and Telxius and supplied by Subcom, has required a significant investment for the deployment of approximately 7,300 kilometers of state-of-the-art  fiber optic submarine cable, which provides greater transmission capacity (72 Tbps) and redundancy to Peru. This is the first new submarine cable to Peru in nearly 20 years.

The cable is expected to be ready for service by mid-2021.

José Luis Díaz Ramírez, General Manager of Telxius Cable in Peru, highlighted the boost that this project will give to communications in Peru and in the Pacific coast countries of Latin America, as well as enabling us to continue offering our customers the highest levels of service, reliability and security. “With the Mistral, the first submarine cable to reach Peru since 2001, the country’s communications will be ready to handle the explosion of data traffic expected as a result of the development of new technologies such as 5G.”

Additionally, Telxius has six more cables connecting Latin America, three of them new generation cables: SAm-1, a 25,000 km fiber-optic cable ring circumnavigating Latin America; and on the Atlantic coast, Brusa, a 11,000-km submarine cable system linking Virginia Beach (USA) with San Juan (Puerto Rico), Fortaleza (Brazil) and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil); Junior, which takes over from Brusa in Rio de Janeiro and connects with Santos (Brazil), and Tannat, linking Santos with Las Toninas (Argentina). Also, the Pacific Caribbean Cable System (PCCS), which runs from Ecuador to Jacksonville (Florida) and lastly, Unisur, which links Las Toninas (Argentina) with Maldonado (Uruguay). 

https://telxius.com/en/claro-and-telxius-deploy-a-new-submarine-cable-in-the-pacific-to-improve-connectivity-for-millions-of-peruvians/

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Cerebras unveils 2nd-gen, 7nm Wafer Scale Engine chip

Cerebras Systems introduced its Wafer Scale Engine 2 (WSE-2) AI processor, boasting 2.6 trillion transistors and 850,000 AI optimized cores.

The wafer-sized processor, which is manufactured by TSMC on its 7nm-node, more than doubles all performance characteristics on the chip - the transistor count, core count, memory, memory bandwidth and fabric bandwidth - over the first generation WSE. 

“Less than two years ago, Cerebras revolutionized the industry with the introduction of WSE, the world’s first wafer scale processor,” said Dhiraj Mallik, Vice President Hardware Engineering, Cerebras Systems. “In AI compute, big chips are king, as they process information more quickly, producing answers in less time – and time is the enemy of progress in AI. The WSE-2 solves this major challenge as the industry’s fastest and largest AI processor ever made.”

The processors powers the Cerebras CS-2 system, which the company says delivers hundreds or thousands of times more performance than legacy alternatives, replacing clusters of hundreds or thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs) that consume dozens of racks, use hundreds of kilowatts of power, and take months to configure and program. The CS-2 fits in one-third of a standard data center rack.

Early deployment sites for the first generation Cerebras WSE and CS-1 included Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) for its groundbreaking Neocortex AI supercomputer, EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh, pharmaceutical leader GlaxoSmithKline, and Tokyo Electron Devices, amongst others.

“At GSK we are applying machine learning to make better predictions in drug discovery, so we are amassing data – faster than ever before – to help better understand disease and increase success rates,” said Kim Branson, SVP, AI/ML, GlaxoSmithKline. “Last year we generated more data in three months than in our entire 300-year history. With the Cerebras CS-1, we have been able to increase the complexity of the encoder models that we can generate, while decreasing their training time by 80x. We eagerly await the delivery of the CS-2 with its improved capabilities so we can further accelerate our AI efforts and, ultimately, help more patients.”

“As an early customer of Cerebras solutions, we have experienced performance gains that have greatly accelerated our scientific and medical AI research,” said Rick Stevens, Argonne National Laboratory Associate Laboratory Director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences. “The CS-1 allowed us to reduce the experiment turnaround time on our cancer prediction models by 300x over initial estimates, ultimately enabling us to explore questions that previously would have taken years, in mere months. We look forward to seeing what the CS-2 will be able to do with more than double that performance.”

https://cerebras.net/product

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Apple TV 4K brings Wi-Fi 6 with MIMO

The newly announced Apple TV 4K connects via 802.11ax Wi‑Fi 6 with MIMO, simultaneous dual band (2.4GHz and 5GHz). 

The device is powered by Apple's A12 Bionic chip that provides a significant boost in graphics performance, video decoding, and audio processing. 

Apple TV 4K runs tvOS, offering tight integration with Apple devices and services.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-unveils-the-next-generation-of-apple-tv-4k/

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Japan Network Access Point deploys Ciena's DCI platform

Japan Network Access Point (JPNAP) has deployed Ciena’s Waveserver Ai data center interconnect (DCI) platform to handle Internet traffic in bustling hubs such as Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, and Sendai.

JPNAP is using Ciena’s Waveserver Ai compact DCI platform to provide 100GbE connectivity between data centers where JPNAP’ PoP exists. With this deployment, JPNAP has simplified its network through increased automation with Waveserver Ai’s integrated line system capability. This has allowed JPNAP to lower capital and operational expenditures while providing ample point-to-point DCI capacity up to 4 Tbps between locations.

“JPNAP’s deployment of Ciena satisfies not only the largest DCI requirements but also paves the way for higher capacities, including 800 Gb/s wavelengths with 400 GbE services,” said Mr. Kazuyasu Takahashi, Vice President and General Manager, Ciena Japan. “Ciena sets the standard for data center efficiency, further reinforcing the value of a network that can adapt to drive innovation.”

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Xilinx introduces adaptive system-on-modules for edge

Xilinx introduced its "Kria" portfolio of adaptive system-on-modules (SOMs), production-ready small form factor embedded boards for edge-based applications. 

The Xilinx SOM roadmap includes a full range of products, from cost-optimized SOMs for size and cost-constrained applications to higher performance modules that will offer developers more real-time compute capability per watt. 

The first product available in the Kria SOM portfolio, the Kria K26 SOM, specifically targets vision AI applications in smart cities and smart factories. It is built on top of the Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC architecture, which features a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor, more than 250 thousand logic cells, and a H.264/265 video codec. The SOM also features 4GB of DDR4 memory and 245 IOs, which allow it to adapt to virtually any sensor or interface. With 1.4 tera-ops of AI compute, the Kria K26 SOM enables developers to create vision AI applications offering more than 3X higher performance at lower latency and power compared to GPU-based SOMs, critical for smart vision applications like security, traffic and city cameras, retail analytics, machine vision, and vision guided robotics.

“Xilinx’s entrance into the burgeoning SOM market builds on our evolution beyond the chip-level business that began with our Alveo boards for the data center and continues with the introduction of complete board-level solutions for embedded systems,” said Kirk Saban, vice president, Product and Platform Marketing at Xilinx. “The Kria SOM portfolio expands our market reach into more edge applications and will make the power of adaptable hardware accessible to millions of software and AI developers.”

http://www.xilinx.com/kria

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Valley TeleCom Group deploys Fujitsu 1FINITY optical platform

Valley TeleCom Group, which serves rural communities throughout Arizona and New Mexico, will deploy the Fujitsu 1FINITY optical networking platform and Virtuora Network Controller (NC), evolving their existing network to support higher bandwidth and software-defined operations and management.

Fujitsu Network Communications said its 1FINITY L100 Lambda blades, plus T300 & T310 Transport blades, will provide Valley TeleCom with greater network capacity and scalability in a minimal footprint. 1FINITY T-Series blades can be combined with 1FINITY L-Series blades to quickly and efficiently create CD or CDC ROADM nodes that scale from small to large network applications. With the software-defined management and control provided by Virtuora NC, Valley adds the management framework for SDN-enabled applications and interfaces that provide the control center of the modern network.

“Valley is evolving our network to continue delivering innovation that our subscribers expect,” said Kristi Lee, chief operations officer at Valley. “By partnering with Fujitsu and Power & Tel on this latest network enhancement, we can continue to provide quality services that support our local businesses, schools and families.”

“Valley’s decision to upgrade their network reflects a common need among many rural service providers,” said Annie Bogue, head of sales and marketing at Fujitsu Network Communications, Inc. “By selecting the 1FINITY platform, Valley is able to meet their bandwidth needs today, while ensuring a cost-efficient path for network evolution.”

https://www.fujitsu.com/us/about/resources/news/press-releases/2021/fnc20210420.html

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VMware looks to Anywhere Workspace capabilities

VMware is integrating several of its solution sets to help companies deliver better and more secure experiences to their employees no matter where they are in the world. The goal is to automate and secure the employee's access.

The new VMware Anywhere Workspace encompasses:

• VMware Workspace ONE provides unified endpoint management, desktop and app virtualization, and a variety of employee experience, productivity, and security related solutions.
• VMware Carbon Black Cloud brings cloud-native endpoint and workload protection.
• VMware SASE will combine SD-WAN capabilities with cloud-delivered security functions, including cloud web security, zero trust network access, and firewalling. These capabilities will be delivered as-a-service from a global network of points of presence (PoPs).

https://www.vmware.com/anywhere-workspace-event.html

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WARPSPACE targets optical relay satellites

WARPSPACE, a spin-out space startup from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, announced 400M JPY (US$3.6 million) in Series A funding for its development of an inter-satellite optical communication relay network service. The concept is to use small optical relay satellites in Low Earth Orbit. Communication to earth stations would also use lasers.

Investors include The Space Frontier Fund (operated by Sparks Innovation for Future Co., Ltd.) and KSK Angel Fund LLC, which is led by professional soccer player Keisuke Honda. 

Shinichiro KENGAKU, Space Frontier Fund, President of General Partner, states:  “We believe that the 2020s will be a decade in which the utilization of satellite data will solve various social issues on the earth. We look forward to the foresight of WARPSPACE, which aims to eliminate the communicational bottleneck that is a condition for realizing such a society. We hope that WARPSPACE will open up the very frontier of the Japanese NewSpace industry.”

https://warpspace.jp/

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