Marvell’s $1.1 billion acquisition of switch ASIC vendor Innovium this week fills a gap in the chipmaker’s lineup and positions it to compete directly with networking giant Broadcom, said Guy Azrad, SVP & GM of Marvell’s networking switch business unit.

Innovium has garnered significant attention since it was founded in 2014, raising $402.3 million in venture funding and carving out nearly 30% of the overall merchant silicon switching market.

At the heart of the acquisition is Innovium’s Teralynx portfolio. Announced in early 2020, Teralynx 8 is capable of throughputs up to 25.6 Tb/s and is widely deployed among large networking vendors including in some Cisco appliances.

“In Marvell Prestera switches we were very focused on feature rich switches,” Azrad said, adding that for cloud customers it became clear there was a need for a dedicated architecture that carefully balanced features, power consumption, bandwidth, and cost.

Teralynx 8 fits this mold, slotting in above Marvell’s existing Prestera portfolio and directly addressing the requirements for high-throughput, low-latency switching in cloud and hyperscale environments, he said.

“Innovium is becoming our Tomahawk line and Prestera is our Trident line,” Azrad said, drawing a direct comparison to Broadcom’s own switch portfolio. “We think that with this acquisition we can actually run very fast in the cloud and the data center and, of course, we'll keep investing on the enterprise and carrier.”

As Marvell looks to address the full spectrum of switching applications and go toe-to-toe with Broadcom, the chipmaker has snapped up several smaller companies.

Arguably the largest acquisition came in late 2020 with the purchase of optoelectrical interconnect vendor Inphi in a cash and stock deal valued at $10 billion.

“Combining Marvell’s copper Ethernet PHY franchise with the Inphi electro-optical portfolio will create an industry-leading, high-speed data interconnect platform, serving the enterprise, carrier, data center, and automotive markets,” Murphy said at the time of the acquisition.

Inphi’s technology, combined with Marvell’s existing switching tech, and bolstered by Innovium’s Teralynx ASICs spans the full networking ecosystem and positions the chipmaker as a viable alternative to Broadcom, Azrad said.

“With Inphi we are starting to get more traction on the optical domain … and with Innovium I think quite a bit of the [manufacturers] will start looking into Marvell as a serious player,” he said. “I think this will be a home run for us in the future."

Sameh Boujelbene, senior director of data center and campus Ethernet switching at Dell’Oro Group, expects the acquisition will drive synergies and allow Marvell to sell more products to individual customers.

“We view this acquisition as very strategic and complementary as scale matters a lot in order to remain competitive in the low-margin cloud networking space,” she said “While Innovium has been already making inroads and gaining share at some of the largest hyperscalers, the firm is expected to benefit from the increased scale that this acquisition will bring.”

Similarly, Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, sees the buy as a “great move for Marvell as it gives them a credible threat to try and chip away at Broadcom’s lock in the hyperscale market.”

“Broadcom has had a near monopoly in the high-end data center switch market, has grown arrogant, and is difficult to work with,” he added. “The industry will benefit from this acquisition.”

Even with Innovium under its umbrella, Marvell faces a hard road ahead if it wants to compete with the 800-pound gorilla of switch world. Broadcom commands nearly three-quarters of the merchant switch silicon sales.

Despite these challenges, Azrad expects many networking vendors will be happy to have an alternative, especially when it comes to hyperscale switching. He added that Marvell has earned a reputation in recent years for being fair, truthful, and honest,  something he said customers appreciate.

While Azrad stopped short of calling out Broadcom’s reputation in the industry, the chipmaker has been called a bully in the past.

“Broadcom has long been regarded as a bully in the semiconductor space,” Kerravala told SDxCentral in an earlier interview. “They force vendors to sign exclusive agreements to get any kind of reasonable pricing. I’ve heard stories of vendors that even hint they might use another chip and Broadcom limits supply and raises prices.”

These practices ultimately resulted in the FTC labeling the chipmaker a monopoly in the fiber to home, and set-top box silicon markets, earlier this summer.