Marvell Adds Hyperscale Ethernet With Innovium Acquisition
Cash used to be king, and now market capitalization is. That’s one of the reasons that the biggest players in the semiconductor arena are snapping up competitors, startups, and suppliers in adjacent chip markets at an increasing pace and with very large bags of “money.” Stock isn’t quite bitcoin, which doesn’t have an initial cap like dollar, euro, renminbi, or yen, but it rises and falls like bitcoin, is not a real currency either, and it can be almost as ephemeral. You might as well spend it while you got it, and companies that are being acquired might as well take it as it is being offered.
And that is one of the reasons why chip maker Marvell has just acquired Innovium, one of the up and coming suppliers of high-end Ethernet switch ASICs, one that has focused almost exclusively on hyperscale and cloud builder datacenters and has expanded recently into edge use cases.
Innovium was founded in 2015 and dropped out of stealth in March 2017, when we did our initial profile of the company. The company was co-founded by three people with deep expertise in datacenter networking. Puneet Agarwal, who is chief technology officer, and Mohammad Issa, who is vice president of engineering, started Innovium to minimalize the protocol stack on switch ASICs and to really push Ethernet to higher bandwidths. It is significant that Agarwal was CTO for switching at Broadcom, the merchant switch silicon leader for datacenter switching, for more than a decade and that Issa was vice president of engineering there as well; they drove Broadcom’s “Trident” and “Tomahawk” switch ASICs, which are the foundation of hyperscale and cloud builder networks to this day, despite very intense competition from a slew of upstarts. Rajiv Khemani, Innovium’s chief executive officer and the third co-founder, ran Intel’s network processing business for a bunch of years and then was chief operating officer at Cavium.
