Features - Storage Innovations:

MARVELL ANNOUNCES MICROPROCESSORS UTILIZING ARM ARCHITECTURE

Marvell and ARM announced that Marvell has signed a full architectural licensing agreement that enables them to produce a new family of high performance, proprietary embedded microprocessors that will fully run the ARM architecture. The new microprocessors incorporate advanced RISC design techniques normally found in high-end microprocessors and achieve 500+MHz-operating frequencies using standard foundry CMOS processes. By using Marvell proprietary targeted custom design techniques, the new microprocessors are able to achieve many times the typical operating speed of fully synthesizable processor cores.

Marvell, only the second company to announce a product family based on the full ARM architecture, is using the new processor family in Marvell system-on-chip (SoC) products. Additionally, Marvell offers access to these high-performance processors for integration with select high volume customer ASICs. This important initiative of integrating the ARM Architecture technology with Marvell's SoCs and ASICs will directly benefit customers by enabling a time-to-market advantage. Leveraging the network of development tools and third-party software supporting the ARM architecture through the ARM Connected Community program further enhances this time-to-market advantage.

"The key to many of our successful products is our mixed signal and DSP capabilities designed in Marvell's SoCs," said Sehat Sutardja, Marvell's president and CEO. "We feel that it is becoming increasingly important though to embed high performance microprocessors in consumer SoCs, as our customers look to deploy more functionality and complex applications. Marvell's investment in developing customised high performance, embedded microprocessors is targeted squarely at this market to provide the best and most unique solution to our customers."

"This partnership with Marvell is an endorsement of the ARM architecture in high-performance embedded applications," said Warren East, CEO of ARM. "Marvell will now be able to offer enhanced microprocessor-based SoCs that provide the high processing capabilities that are needed in the consumer entertainment, networking and storage space. ARM is committed to achieving significant growth in the embedded control market and the ARM-Marvell relationship will accelerate us towards that goal."

There are many end markets where customers can benefit from high performance embedded microprocessors. Among the largest market opportunity is the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) market. In the traditional HDD market, faster processors translate to faster access times and transaction throughput. The new emerging consumer audio and video end markets will also benefit from small form factor and low cost HDD devices that can implement a variety of media decoding formats, such as MPEG4 and MP3. Previously these functions would have been handled using a combination of complex hardwired digital logic and one or two microprocessors versus using only one new, Marvell high performance microprocessor. This new solution not only can achieve a lower system cost but the embedded high performance microprocessor enables future upgrades to the system.

Another market that will benefit from higher performance microprocessors is the printer market. This market is a good example of where a higher performance microprocessor is always needed. Higher performance equates to more pages per minute for the end user. Similarly, low power, high performance PDAs will also benefit tremendously from high performance microprocessors and longer battery-life.

Additionally, many of Marvell's leading wired and wireless LAN communication solutions will also benefit from the new embedded microprocessor technology enabling faster, more functional switches and routers to support expanding Quality of Service, System Management and Security capabilities.