Marvell to acquire Innovium for data center switching silicon

Marvell Technology agreed to acquire Innovium, a start-up offering switching silicon for cloud and edge data centers, in an all-stock transaction valued at $1.1 billion.

Innovium, which is based in San Jose, California, offers high-performance switching silicon solutions for cloud and edge data centers. The company was founded in 2014 and has approximately 230 employees.

Marvell, which has an extensive portfolio of Ethernet switch semiconductor solutions, and which recently acquired Inphi, said the deal accelerates its position in cloud data centers. Its portfolio for cloud data centers includes: cloud data center solutions, including: 

• High-speed Electro-Optical PAM4 and Coherent DSP chipsets 
• Pluggable COLORZ DCI modules OCTEON-based DPUs for security, offload, and acceleration 
• Custom Arm-based server CPUs 
• Full custom ASICs Bravera
• Flash and HDD-based storage
• and on closing the acquisition of Innovium, cloud-optimized Ethernet switches

“Our acquisition of Innovium and its complementary offerings further extends Marvell’s leadership in the cloud, and I am excited that Innovium has secured significant share at a marquee cloud customer,” said Matt Murphy, President and CEO of Marvell. “Innovium has established itself as a strong cloud data center merchant switch silicon provider with a proven platform, and we look forward to working with their talented team who have a strong track record in the industry for delivering multiple generations of highly successful products.”

“The Innovium vision is centered on delivering breakthrough switch silicon and choice for next-generation cloud and edge data centers. Bringing technology leadership and customer-focused innovation to the market is what drives our team every day,” said Rajiv Khemani, CEO and Founder of Innovium. “I want to recognize and thank our valued employees for their passion, commitment, and outstanding execution. We are excited to join Marvell and accelerate the growth of our business, partnerships, and solution value, while contributing to the company’s fast-growing cloud opportunity.”

Marvell said it will continue to advance its Prestera 2K to 8K product families for the enterprise and carrier switch market. The company expects Innovium will enable the addition of approximately $150 million in incremental revenue next fiscal year.

Innovium pushes switching silicon to 25.6 Tbps with support for 112G PAM4

Monday, May 11, 2020    

Innovium unveiled its TERALYNX 8 networking switch silicon featuring a massive 25.6 Tbps capacity and support for 112G PAM4 SerDes I/O. This next-generation TERALYNX 8 design features deep programmability, the largest on-chip buffers, and advanced telemetry capabilities.

Innovium's TERALYNX 8 switch, which is aimed at hyperscale data centers and which is expected to sample in the second half of 2020, could be used for highly compact, highest port-density single-chip switches for 100G to 800G configurations, including 1RU, 32 x 800G switch. The silicon will be delivered in a single 7nm die fabricated by TSMC.

Innovium confirmed that its current generation, 12.7 Tbps switching silicon is already being used by numerous commercial customers, including some of the biggest cloud provider networks.

Innovium shipped over one million 400G ports in 2020

Tuesday, February 09, 2021  #400G, Data Centers, Innovium, Silicon, Switching  

Innovium, a start-up offering high-performance switching silicon, shipped over one million 400G TERALYNX switch silicon ports in 2020. The company said it is seeing a rapid ramp of 400G connectivity by top cloud customers using its TERALYNX based switches. “2020 was a great year for Innovium. Demand for bandwidth accelerated across all cloud data centers driven by worldwide growth in online businesses, remote everything and digitization...

READ MORE

Innovium raises $170 million for its switching silicon

Tuesday, July 21, 2020  Innovium, Silicon, Switching  

Innovium, a start-up based in San Jose, California, raised $170 million for its switching silicon solutions cloud and edge data centers. The new funding round included investments from Premji Invest, DFJ Growth, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, and multiple strategic investors, along with existing investors including Greylock, Capricorn, WRVI, Qualcomm Ventures, Redline, S-Cubed Capital and DAG . Innovium said this latest funding makes...

Marvell completes acquisition of Inphi

Tuesday, April 20, 2021  Inphi, Marvell  

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.

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. 

The cash and stock transaction was 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. 

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

Read More

Google teams with Sparkle on 2 subsea cables

Google is collaborating with Sparkle and others to build and operate two submarine cable systems linking the Middle East with southern Europe and Asia: 

• the Blue Submarine Cable System connecting Italy, France, Greece, and Israel; 
• the Raman Submarine Cable System connecting Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Oman and India. 
  

Both cables will be equipped with 16 fiber optic pairs and are expected to be ready for service in 2024. They will also support multiple fibre tenants, and feature open landing stations enabling competitive access to the cable termination points.

Sparkle notes that Blue will be deployed along a new northbound route in the Mediterranean, crossing the Strait of Messina, rather than following the traditional route through Sicily Channel. Within the Blue System, BlueMed submarine cable is now Sparkle’s own private domain sharing its wet components with four additional fibre pairs and an initial design capacity of more than 25 Tbps per fibre pair, and is extended up to Jordan (Aqaba) with additional private branches into France (Corsica), Greece (Chania – Crete), Italy (Golfo Aranci – Sardinia and Rome), Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Turkey, Cyprus and more in the future.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/announcing-the-blue-and-raman-subsea-cable-systems

Read More

Juniper offer Zero Trust Cloud Workload Protection

Juniper Networks introduced a Zero Trust Data Center architecture to automatically defend application workloads in any cloud or on-premises data center environment against application exploits as they happen, including the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10 and memory-based attacks.

Juniper Cloud Workload Protection is a lightweight software agent that controls application execution and monitors the application’s behavior and context, with vulnerability remediation is done automatically without admin intervention. 

The company says its new product provides the following critical capabilities:

• Signatureless Run-Time Application Self-Protection (RASP) provides real-time protection against attacks. It protects the application from malicious actions, such as exploitation and data theft, without any manual intervention, catching sophisticated attacks that endpoint detection (EDR) and web application firewall (WAF) solutions cannot.
• Memory-Based Attack Prevention provides real-time protection against advanced memory-based attacks, including fileless, return-oriented programming (ROP) and buffer overflow attacks.
• Vulnerability Detection continuously assesses vulnerabilities in applications and containers to detect serious and critical exploit attempts as they happen. Juniper Cloud Workload Protection delivers information on the exploit attempt to DevSecOps teams to better understand where the vulnerability exists, so they can remediate.
• Comprehensive Telemetry provides rich application-level security event generation and reporting, including application connectivity, topology and detailed information about the attempted attack.
• Optimized Control Flow Integrity (OCFI) technology minimizes false alerts by validating the execution of applications and detecting attacks without using behavior or signatures.
• Zero Trust Microsegmentation shields application resources from lateral threat propagation and integrates with Juniper vSRX Virtualized Firewalls to restrict access based on risk, even as workloads and virtual environments change. Automated threat response with built-in, real-time telemetry helps security teams detect threats once and block them across the entire network.

https://blogs.juniper.net/en-us/security/connecting-and-protecting-applications-within-a-zero-trust-data-center-architecture-with-juniper-cloud-workload-protection

Read More

STL collaborates with Facebook Connectivity on Evenstar radio units

STL is collaborating with Facebook Connectivity to design and develop 4G and 5G radio products as part of the Evenstar program, which is a collaborative effort led Facebook Connectivity  to accelerate the adoption of Open RAN technology. 

Through this collaboration, STL will build two advanced, high-power macro radio products. The first one is an O-RAN compliant radio providing higher capacity for dense deployments. As part of this engagement, STL will also develop an O-RAN compliant 4G+5G Dual Technology Radio that supports both technologies individually or/and concurrently. These 3GPP and O-RAN compliant radio products will be developed over the next year and will enable telecom operators around the world to scale up commercial deployments of open networking infrastructure and prepare their networks for Open RAN 5G.

Commenting on this collaboration, Chris Rice, CEO Access Solutions Business, STL, said, "We are delighted to support and contribute to the Evenstar program to develop 3GPP and O-RAN compliant radio products. Through this collaboration, STL extends its existing commitment towards creating a robust, open and disaggregated, access network ecosystem. By enabling  an open networking infrastructure through efforts like this one, we are enabling global telecom service providers to take the power of 5G technology to billions of people worldwide at lower cost points."

https://www.stl.tech/

Read More

Nozomi raises $100 million for OT and IoT security

Nozomi Networks, a start-up based in San Francisco, announced a $100 million pre-IPO-funding round to help accelerate its OT and IoT security solutions.

The company said it plans to grow its sales, marketing and partner enablement efforts, and enhance its products to address new challenges in both the operational technology (OT) and internet of things (IoT) visibility and security markets. 

The Series D funding was led by Triangle Peak Partners and included Forward Investments, Honeywell Ventures, In-Q-Tel, Keysight Technologies, Porsche Ventures, and Telefónica Ventures.

“As we began the fund-raising process, many of the largest ecosystem partners in the world along with our customers recognized Nozomi Networks as the industry leader and requested the opportunity to invest in the company,” said Edgard Capdevielle, President and CEO of Nozomi Networks. “It’s the ultimate endorsement when not only a prestigious firm such as Triangle Peak Partners leads the investment, but customers and partners embrace Nozomi Networks and further validate our market leadership.”

“With the OT and IoT security market on the verge of explosive growth, Nozomi Networks has not only risen to the top but is strongly positioned to continue to outpace the market,” said Dain F. DeGroff, Co-founding Partner and President, Triangle Peak Partners.“The company’s consistently strong performance in combination with an impressive R&D model and its ability to scale quickly set itself apart. We’re excited to be a part of Nozomi Networks’ future.”

Read More

NeoPhotonics posts Q2 sales of $65 million

 NeoPhotonics reported Q2 revenue of $65.0 million, up 7% quarter-over-quarter and down 37% year-over-year. Gross margin was 15.2%, down from 21.9% in the prior quarter and non-GAAP net loss per share was $0.22, compared to Non-GAAP net loss of $0.15 per share in the prior quarter.

"Building on our strong performance in the second quarter, we see accelerating growth in the back half of the year, driven by the initial ramp of 400ZR and related products adding to our 400G+ suite,” said Tim Jenks, Chairman and CEO of NeoPhotonics. “We are ramping our modules and component level products, including our Nano Tunable Laser, putting us in a good position to return to profitability,” concluded Mr. Jenks.

Read More