Marvell announces acquisition of optical chip company Polariton

According to reports, Marvell announced the acquisition of Polariton Technologies, a high-speed and low-power plasma silicon photonics company, to strengthen its optical modulation technology, upgrade its coherent optical interconnect platform, and further improve product bandwidth, energy efficiency and integration capabilities.

Polariton was born in 2019 and was born out of the scientific research team of ETH Zurich. It is the first company in the world to commercialize plasma electro-optical technology. The company has a self-developed prototype production line, exclusive patents and mature technical solutions. Its products can be widely used in high-speed optical communications, precision test and measurement, quantum information and other fields.

In February this year, Polariton has delivered plasma-modulated silicon light-emitting chips to a number of head optical module manufacturers. The single-channel rate can reach 400G and above, and the technology has officially entered the commercial evaluation stage. This solution is adapted to the AI computing power cluster interconnection scenario, solves the traditional silicon photonics power consumption bottleneck, and is compatible with the mainstream 200mm silicon photonics semiconductor supply chain.

Polariton's modulator electro-optical bandwidth exceeds 110GHz, the device size is smaller, and the parasitic capacitance is lower. The goal is to control the 400G channel power consumption within 0.5pJ/bit, which is of significance for the large-scale application of CPO co-packaged optics. At the same time, the company has optimized its technical shortcomings to achieve CMOS process compatibility, and the measured single-channel rate exceeded 400Gbit/s.

Marvell is a fabless semiconductor design company established in 1995 and headquartered in Silicon Valley, USA. The company's main business is data center optical interconnection DSP, silicon photonics, Ethernet switching, storage main control, customized ASIC, CXL interconnection chips, supporting AI computing power clusters, cloud networks, and DCI data center interconnection scenarios; it also lays out 5G communications, automotive Ethernet, and enterprise network businesses.

This acquisition will deeply integrate Polariton's advanced plasma technology with Marvell's existing silicon photonics and DSP computing capabilities, improve the layout of optoelectronics, switching, and customized silicon full-chain connection products, and provide highly integrated, scalable, high-speed interconnect solutions for next-generation cloud data centers and AI infrastructure.

Marvell also takes this opportunity to broaden its optical technology route and consolidate its leading position in the field of high-speed optical communications. The specific financial terms of this transaction were not disclosed.