Cavium, Inc. was a fabless semiconductor company based in San Jose, California, specializing in ARM-based and MIPS-based network, video and security processors and SoCs. The company was co-founded in 2000 by Syed B. Ali and M. Raghib Hussain, who were introduced to each other by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Cavium offers processor- and board-level products targeting routers, switches, appliances, storage and servers.
The company went public in May 2007 with about 175 employees. As of 2011, following numerous acquisitions, it had about 850 employees worldwide, of whom about 250 were located at company headquarters in San Jose.
Cavium was acquired by Marvell Technology Group on July 6, 2018.
History
Name change
On June 17, 2011, Cavium Networks, Inc. changed its name to Cavium, Inc.
Acquisitions by Cavium
| Date | Acquired company | Historical product line |
|---|---|---|
| August 2008 | Star Semiconductor | ARM-based systems-on-chip processors |
| December 2008 | W&W Communications | Video compression software and hardware |
| December 2009 | MontaVista Software | Carrier Grade Linux compliant Linux & embedded systems |
| January 2011 | Celestial Semiconductor | SoCs for digital media applications, including satellite, cable, and Internet TV |
| February 2011 | Wavesat Telecommunications | Semiconductor solutions for carrier and mobile device manufacturers |
| July 2014 | Xpliant, Inc. | Switching and SDN Specialist |
| June 2016 | QLogic, Inc. | Ethernet and Storage Specialist |
Acquisition of Cavium
In November 2017, Cavium's board of directors agreed to the company's purchase by Marvell Technology Group for $6 billion in cash and stock. The merger was finalized on July 6, 2018.
Products
Cavium began selling security processors in late 2001 with the Nitrox line. The processor had support for features like IPsec, SSL, intrusion-detection services as well as VPNs. In 2004 the company launched the Octeon processor, which was using a 64-bit MIPS instruction set. At launch Cavium offered Octeon processors with two, four eight or sixteen cores. In 2012, the company announced a 1-48 core MIPS-processor from the Octeon-line. In 2014, the company announced the ThunderX, a 48 core server SoC based on the ARMv8 architecture. Cavium also offered ethernet switches that were produced in cooperation with Xpliant since 2014.
