Marvell Technology

Marvell was founded in 1995 by Dr. Sehat Sutardja, his wife Weili Dai, and his brother Pantas Sutardja. They worked on designing a CMOS-based read channel for disk drives as its first product. Seagate Technology became its first customer.

The company's initial public offering of 6 million shares on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol MRVL on June 27, 2000 (near the end of the dot-com bubble) raised $90 million and was priced $15 per share.

In February 2003, the integrated circuit (IC) designer Marvell Technology Group closed the deal to acquire RADLAN Computer Communications for $49.7 million in cash and shares.

California-based Marvell said it would incorporate its mixed-signal ICs with RADLAN's networking infrastructure drivers, interfaces and software modules to make improved networking communications products like routers. Yuval Cohen replaced Jacob Zankel as chief executive in late 2006.

In May 2007 Radlan was officially renamed Marvell Software Solutions Israel (MSSI), to complete the integration into Marvell.

In April 2016, CEO Sehat Sutardja and President Weili Dai were ousted from their posts after activist investor Starboard Value fund took a roughly seven percent stake in the company.

In July 2016, Marvell appointed Matt Murphy as its new president and CEO.

On July 6, 2018, Marvell completed its acquisition of Cavium, Inc. On the same day, it announced the appointment of Syed Ali (co-founder of Cavium, Inc., and previously the company's president and CEO), Brad Buss (director of Cavium, Inc.) and Edward Frank (director of Cavium, Inc.) to the Marvell Board of Directors.

Data processing unit

Marvell OCTEON and ARMADA DPUs which integrate a CPU, network interfaces and programmable data acceleration engines on a specialized electronic circuit.

Custom

Marvell also offered Customer Specific Standard Product (CSSP), where customer accelerators and interfaces could be integrated directly into Marvell's Octeon processors. Following Marvell's 2019 acquisition of Avera Semiconductor (formerly the custom ASIC division of GlobalFoundries and prior to that of IBM), Marvell offers custom ASIC tailored to clients' specific design goals. And it provides services for ASICs development to the Aerospace and Defense industries through its independent subsidiary Marvell Government Solutions (MGS). In a joint venture with TSMC, Marvell introduced a 3nm product.

Infrastructure processors

On November 12, 2019, Marvell announced that its ThunderX2 SoCs have been deployed on Microsoft Azure. On March 2, 2020, Marvell announced OCTEON Fusion and OCTEON TX2 5G infrastructure processors, as well as deals to provide processors for 5G Infrastructure for Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson, ZTE, and Samsung. On March 16, 2020, Marvell announced ThunderX3 and its plan for ThunderX4 in 2022. On August 28, 2020, Marvell announced a plan to refocus its ThunderX Server Teams to its Custom Silicon Business.

Security solutions

Marvell's security-related products include its LiquidSecurity HSM Adapters and NITROX Cryptographic Offload Engines.

Through the years, Marvell acquired smaller companies to enter new markets.

Controversies

Stock options

In 2006, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) started an inquiry into the company's stock option grant practices.

An investigation determined "grant dates were chosen with the benefit of hindsight" to make the options more valuable.

The press estimated that the founders and other executives had made $760 million in gains from the options, which were awarded by the founding couple, Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai.

The SEC asked to interview the company's general counsel Matthew Gloss, but Marvell claimed attorney–client privilege.

Gloss was fired just before the investigation results were announced in May 2007.

Abraham David Sofaer was hired to investigate the investigation after Gloss alleged it was not independent. In announcing the results of its own inquiry, the SEC did not give Marvell the credit granted to other companies in the options scandal for cooperating with the SEC's investigation or for cleaning up. At the time of the announcement, the co-acting regional director of the SEC's San Francisco office stated, among other things, that the SEC did not believe that the lack of cooperation and remediation shown by Marvell merited much credit in terms of being lenient with Marvell. In announcing its results, the SEC found that Gloss was not a participant in Dai and Sutardja's backdating scheme.