Vendor lineage
Marvell - founded on a disk drive, ended up in the network
Silicon company incorporated in 1995 by three founders, now a supplier of networking and infrastructure chips.
Marvell was incorporated on 10 February 1995 by Sehat Sutardja, Weili Dai and Pantas Sutardja. Its first product was a read channel for hard disk drives - the circuit that turns the noisy analogue signal from a magnetic head into digital data - built in CMOS when the industry used a more expensive process.
It had working chips by Christmas 1995 and Seagate as its first customer. The approach - high-speed sampling and digital filtering in CMOS, where the incumbents used analogue peak detection in a more expensive process - increased the data density a drive could hold, and took Texas Instruments out of the read-channel business.
The path from that to networking silicon is the ordinary one for this industry and worth stating. A read channel is a mixed-signal problem: recovering a weak analogue signal at high speed and deciding what bits it carries. So is a physical-layer transceiver on an Ethernet port, and so is the serialiser underneath every fast interface. The same CMOS approach carried across, and the disk drive is simply where the money was in 1995.
Its timing is also a data point for the making milestones on this site. The fabless model was just becoming viable when Marvell was founded, and the company is one of the early successes of it - designing silicon it did not manufacture, at the moment that stopped being a disadvantage.
The founder’s own beginning belongs here because this site records how people enter this work. Sehat Sutardja built a Van de Graaff generator in Jakarta after finding his brother’s hobbyist magazines, learned that transistors would improve it, and held a radio repair licence by the age of thirteen. The names printed on those transistors - Fairchild, National Semiconductor, Motorola, Texas Instruments - were American, and that is what sent him to the United States in 1980. He took a doctorate at Berkeley and held more than four hundred patents by the end. In 2004 the three founders were recognised jointly, in the networking and communications category.
One of his later ideas has a place in the making milestones. At a solid-state circuits conference in 2015 he proposed modular chips - building a large device from several small ones connected together rather than as a single die. The industry adopted the approach and a different name for it, chiplets, and it is now how most large processors are actually constructed.
- IEEE Spectrum - Sehat Sutardja, an engineering Marvell: on 10 February 1995 Sehat Sutardja, his wife Weili Dai and his brother Pantas incorporated Marvell, named for the marvellous things they planned and for the pattern of successful company names ending in el or ell - Intel, Novell, Nortel; the first product was a read channel for disk drives built in CMOS rather than the BiCMOS then standard
- Sehat Sutardja (Wikipedia): born Jakarta 1961, died 2024; BS from Iowa State, MS and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley; more than 440 patents; IEEE fellow; in 2004 he and his fellow founders received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in the networking and communications category
- EDN - the life and chip works of Marvell co-founder Sehat Sutardja: a certified radio repair technician at thirteen, building devices from parts in his parents’ shop in Jakarta; at ISSCC in 2015 he presented modular chips, MoChi, an idea that became known as chiplets