Marvell Technology Group (MRVL)

Expand Our System-Level Approach to Design

        We intend to expand our use of a system-level approach to develop products to improve the time-to-market and production of our products, and in turn to assist our customers to introduce their products more rapidly to the market. Our system-level approach considers the various components in a system to anticipate and effectively evaluate the various systems issues and tradeoffs that our customers will face when designing our products into their equipment. Our architects, designers, technical marketing engineers and applications engineers have broad knowledge of communications system architectures and advanced microprocessors, allowing us to take a system-level approach in the design of our products. This helps us to partition our devices properly and to attain appropriate levels of integration. A system-level approach also results in modular offerings: a device may operate on a stand-alone basis as a complete basic system or various devices may be interconnected to form a more complex system.

        In designing a product, we also conduct system-level simulations in which the software model of a new device interacts with models of the devices with which it will interface in a typical system in order to test system-level operability. These simulations are often conducted with key customers that provide extensive feedback to our design team. As a result, we have successfully designed products that are highly functional on first silicon. Additionally, with our acquisition of RADLAN Computer Communications Ltd., a leading provider of embedded networking software, we are now able to combine our system-level designs with RADLAN's embedded networking software to provide our customers with production-ready designs and kits.