Media Eye | Technological innovation is moving from chips to systems

"Marvell's technological innovation is moving from the chip level to the system level." Marvell Vice President Wu Xiaodong said at a recent New Year's media communication meeting that with the changes in market demand, the industry is eager to find ways to reduce chip energy consumption. It can be said that the entire industry design is at a "crossroads." Under this trend, Marvell launched the FLC and MoChi architectures from a forward-looking perspective. These two unique architectures are subversions of traditional methods, which will greatly reduce system costs and equipment energy consumption, and bring new solutions that take into account both cost and energy efficiency.

FLC technology is designed to substantially reduce the amount of DRAM main memory required in the system, replacing it with a small, high-speed DRAM cache and solid-state drive storage layer. From a specific data point of view, FLC can reduce the main memory required in the system to one-tenth of the original, thereby creating lower-cost, lighter-weight and higher-performance products.

"MoChi is a new inline architecture design." Wu Xiaodong said that with the support of MoChi technology, designing and producing SoC chips will be as simple as building Lego blocks. In fact, the introduction of MoChi technology is to meet users' requirements for flexibility, timely listing, and highly scalable platforms . By using the two major architectures of FLC and MoChi, terminal manufacturers can build an extremely flexible platform to complete the design of flagship to mass-market mobile phones, greatly accelerating the time to market and reducing R&D costs.

At CES 2016, Marvell launched the first single-chip system based on the MoChi architecture, the ARMADA 3700, which can provide low-power solutions for media storage, retail routers, and WiFi repeater applications . From a design point of view, the ARMADA 3700 is a highly flexible and scalable solution that can optimize media-connected network storage, mobile-connected network storage, distributed cloud SSD/HDD storage, consumer WiFi routers, WiFi repeaters, IoT hubs, and gateway applications. At the same time, the ARMADA 3700 is also an extremely low-power solution that can be used for battery-powered media storage. Its compact size (11.5mm×10.5mm) enables smaller and simpler product designs.

"Marvell will continue to invest in technological innovation." Wu Xiaodong said that in the past five years, Marvell's annual R&D investment has exceeded US$1 billion, and will continue to grow in the future. Currently, Marvell has obtained more than 5,000 patents , with more than 2,500 patents pending. The company has been listed in the Thomson Reuters "Top 100 Global Innovators" list for four consecutive years.