Marvell wants to be next TI

THE COMPANY that bought Intel's mobile phone chip business, the Marvell Technology group, has explained its philosophy to David Whelan of Forbes magazine. It simply wants to displace the existing mobile chip Number One - Texas Instruments.

The group agreed to the purchase back in June for $600 million. Essentially it got the rights to Intel's PXA9xx (Hermon) communications processor which is inside Research in Motion's (RIM's) Blackberry 8700 and the PXA27x (Bulverde) applications processor which is used in the Palm Treo and the Motorola Q.

Marvell is a family run business. It's founder, Dr Sehat Sutardja, his wife - Weili Dai and brother - Pantas Sutardja between them own 22 per cent of the company's shares. "We want to be the next Texas Instruments," Sutardja said.

Marvell claims to have dominated every market it has chosen to enter. It says it knocked Texas Instruments out of the disk drive chip business and displaced Broadcom in key communications markets such as Ethernet ports and Wi-Fi radios.

Marvell's chips can also be found inside a Cisco router; an Apple iPod; a Microsoft Xbox 360 and most hard drives. It's main competitors besides TI are Qualcomm and Freescale. None of whom are a push-over.

Marvell's strategy is quite simple. It will wring profits where Intel failed to find them - by moving the manufacturing from Intel plants (which it did not acquire) to cheaper Taiwanese ones. This sounds like bad news for its existing 1,400 employees such as those based at Intel's Chandler, Arizona factory.

Nevertheless, its philosophy might just work - marketing the mobile phone chips with more vigour to phone makers than ever the PC-centric Intel did. µ

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