Archive for the 'Optical Modules' Category
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September 22, 2025
Marvell Wins Leading EDGE Award for Ara 1.6T Optical DSP
By Vienna Alexander, Marketing Content Professional, Marvell
Marvell is the Leading EDGE 2025 winner for its Ara product, a 3nm 1.6 Tbps PAM4 optical DSP platform, which enables the industry’s lowest power 1.6T optical modules. The engineering community voted to recognize the product as a leader in design innovation this year.The EDGE awards celebrate outstanding innovations in product design for the engineering industry that have contributed to the advancement of technology. This award is presented by the Engineering Design & Automation Group, a subset of brands at Endeavor Business Media.
Ara is the industry’s first 3nm 1.6T PAM4 optical DSP platform. Marvell introduced it to meet growing interconnect bandwidth demands for AI and next-gen cloud data center scale-out networks.
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July 02, 2025
Inside Marvell’s Expanding Custom Silicon Opportunity
By Michael Kanellos, Head of Influencer Relations, Marvell
The opportunity for custom silicon isn’t just getting larger – it’s becoming more diverse.
At the Custom AI Investor Event, Marvell executives outlined how the push to advance accelerated infrastructure is driving surging demand for custom silicon – reshaping the customer base, product categories and underlying technologies. (Here is a link to the recording and presentation slides.)
Data infrastructure spending is now slated to surpass $1 trillion by 20281 with the Marvell total addressable market (TAM) for data center semiconductors rising to $94 billion by then, 26% larger than the year before. Of that total, $55.4 billion revolves around custom devices for accelerated compute1. In fact, the forecast for every major product segment has risen in the past year, underscoring the growing momentum behind custom silicon.
The deeper you go into the numbers, the more compelling the story becomes. The custom market is evolving into two distinct elements: the XPU segment, focused on optimized CPUs and accelerators, and the XPU attach segment that includes PCIe retimers, co-processors, CPO components, CXL controllers and other devices that serve to increase the utilization and performance of the entire system. Meanwhile, the TAM for custom XPUs is expected to reach $40.8 billion by 2028, growing at a 47% CAGR1.
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June 06, 2025
Welcome to the “OFC Film Festival”
By Kirt Zimmer, Head of Social Media Marketing, Marvell
The OFC 2025 event in San Francisco was so vast that it would be easy to miss a few stellar demos from your favorite optical networking companies. That’s why we took the time to create videos featuring the latest Marvell technology.
Put them all together and you have a wonderful film festival for technophiles. Enjoy!
Co-Packaged Optics Through Silicon Photonics
We spoke with Kishore Atreya, Senior Director of Cloud Platform Marketing at Marvell, who discussed co-packaged optics. Instead of moving data via electrons, a light engine converts electrical signals into photons—unlocking ultra-high-speed, low-power optical data transfer.
The 1.6T and 6.4T light engines from Marvell can be integrated directly into the chip package, minimizing trace lengths, reducing power and enabling true plug-and-play fiber connectivity. It is flexible, scalable, and built for switching, XPUs, and beyond.
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April 17, 2025
Advancing Optics with a Hybrid Route to TIAs
By Nicola Bramante, Senior Principal Engineer
Transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs) are one of the unsung heroes of the cloud and AI era.
At the recent OFC 2025 event in San Francisco, exhibitors demonstrated the latest progress on 1.6T optical modules featuring Marvell 200G TIAs. Recognized by multiple hyperscalers for its superior performance, Marvell 200G TIAs are becoming a standard component in 200G/lane optical modules for 1.6T deployments.
TIAs capture incoming optical signals from light detectors and transform the underlying data to be transmitted between and used by servers and processors in data centers and scale-up and scale-out networks. Put another way, TIAs allow data to travel from photons to electrons. TIAs also amplify the signals for optical digital signal processors, which filter out noise and preserve signal integrity.
And they are pervasive. Virtually every data link inside a data center longer than three meters includes an optical module (and hence a TIA) at each end. TIAs are critical components of fully retimed optics (FRO), transmit retimed optics (TRO) and linear pluggable optics (LPO), enabling scale-up servers with hundreds of XPUs, active optical cables (AOC), and other emerging technologies, including co-packaged optics (CPO), where TIAs are integrated into optical engines that can sit on the same substrates where switch or XPU ASICs are mounted. TIAs are also essential for long-distance ZR/ZR+ interconnects, which have become the leading solution for connecting data centers and telecom infrastructure. Overall, TIAs are a must have component for any optical interconnect solution and the market for interconnects is expected to triple to $11.5 billion by 2030, according to LightCounting.
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February 19, 2025
Radha Nagarajan named to the National Academy of Engineering
By Kirt Zimmer, Head of Social Media Marketing
Even in the very practical world of engineering, heart-warming stories can inspire. A perfect example of this has just transpired.
Dr. Radha Nagarajan has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He serves as Marvell’s Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Optical Engineering, in the Datacenter Engineering Group.
Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer, essentially akin to making it into the Hall of Fame of Engineering if such a thing existed. NAE membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research, practice, or education.” NAE members - who number more than 2,600 - are highly accomplished engineering professionals representing a broad spectrum of engineering disciplines working in business, academia, and government.
