Marvell Injects New CXL Technology into Cloud-Optimized CXL Portfolio with Tanzanite Acquisition

The News: Marvell announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Tanzanite Silicon Solutions, Inc., a developer of Compute Express Link (CXL) technologies, in an all-cash transaction. Marvell’s on-going data center-focused investments, including in its CXL solutions, have expanded the company’s addressable market to advance a comprehensive portfolio of cloud-optimized silicon solutions. Read the Marvell Press Release here.

Marvell Injects New CXL Technology into Cloud-Optimized CXL Portfolio with Tanzanite Acquisition

Analyst Take: I am impressed by Marvell’s M&A acumen as the company continues to obtain technology assets and expertise that swiftly augments its portfolio and bolsters its overall competitiveness. This time, Marvell acquires Tanzanite Silicon through an all-cash transaction that enables it to broaden its addressable market and ecosystem influence across the cloud-optimized silicon market segment.

I see this as an important move: Marvell needed to acquire Tanzanite to ensure control and oversight over Tanzanite’s CXL technology in advancing Marvell’s vision of fully composable cloud infrastructure. CXL is an industry standard for connecting processors, accelerators, and memory, developed to power new cloud data center architectures that can offer significant performance and efficiency gains.

Marvell has effectively precluded rivals from taking over the Tanzanite portfolio and engineering assets as ecosystem-wide demand for composable cloud architecture capabilities expand. Specifically, Tanzanite’s architecture and purpose-built design of a “Smart Logic Interface Connector” SoC targets enabling independent scaling and sharing of memory and compute with low latency within and across servers.

From my view, with this acquisition Marvell locks in CXL benefits such as extending the infrastructure agility needed to immediately allocate resources aligned to workload requirements which can produce improvement in use optimization as well as reduced total cost of ownership. Now Marvell can use CXL technology to power the built-out of fully disaggregated architectures as data center environments demand more higher speed interconnectivity coupled with optimized compute, networking, memory, security, and storage silicon fabrics and chipset solutions.

The trend toward disaggregated architectures also accords with the emerging clear requirement for a new cloud/data center networking architecture that provides better security through micro-segmentation, distributed firewalls, and pervasive visibility, as well as delivering improved agility that emulates hyper-scaler cloud networking operational models. This new architecture demands that networking and security are pushed out to the host.

The Tanzanite deal follows on Marvell’s string of acquisitions that include Innovium for $1.1 billion in August 2021 and the completion of the Inphi acquisition for $10 billion in April 2021. With the Innovium deal, Marvell proved its strategic commitment to the Ethernet switch semiconductor market and with the Inphi deal Marvell locked in Inphi’s chips, particularly Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM) 4 Digital Signal Processor (DSP) capabilities, which fulfill the burgeoning hyperscaler demand for enabling and scaling the trafficking of data over fiber-optic cables.

Key Takeaways on Marvell’s Acquisition of Tanzanite

Tanzanite acquisition is a logical tuck-in follow-through on Marvell’s portfolio development and marketing focus on winning more cloud-optimized silicon business. Moreover, I expect the completion of the transaction to go smoothly as Tanzanite’s headcount is only around 40 and is headquartered “down the road” in Milpitas, CA. Now Marvell strengthens its end-to-end data infrastructure building blocks proposition and boosts its competitive foundation for driving more cloud semiconductor business and ecosystem standing.

Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.

Other insights from Futurum Research:

OFC 2022: Marvell Adds Unique Touch to New Cloud-Optimized 400G/800G PAM4 DSPs

Marvell Ups Its Cloud Data Center Game with $1.1 Billion Acquisition of Innovium

Marvell Fortifies Cloud Data Center Networking Portfolio with New Atlas and Alaska Chipsets

Image Credit: Marvell

The original version of this article was first published on Futurum Research.