Cavium, Inc. was a

fabless Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing their fabrication (or ''fab'') to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry. These foundries are typically, but not exclu ...

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity between that of a conductor and an insulator. Its conductivity can be modified by adding impurities (" doping") to its crystal structure. When two regions with different doping level ...

company based in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially the City of San José ( ; ), is a cultural, commercial, and political center within Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. With a city population of 997,368 and a metropolitan area population of 1.95 million, it is ...

, specializing in ARM-based and MIPS-based network, video and security processors and

SoCs SOCS (suppressor of cytokine signaling proteins) refers to a family of genes involved in inhibiting the JAK-STAT signaling pathway. Genes * CISH (gene), CISH * SOCS1 * SOCS2 * SOCS3 * SOCS4 * SOCS5 * SOCS6 * SOCS7 Structure All SOCS have certai ...

. 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 In electrical engineering, a switch is an electrical component that can disconnect or connect the conducting path in an electrical circuit, interrupting the electric current or diverting it from one conductor to another. The most common type o ...

, 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 Marvell Technology, Inc. is an American company, headquartered in Santa Clara, California, which develops and produces semiconductors and related technology. Founded in 1995, the company had more than 6,500 employees as of 2024, with over 10,000 ...

on July 6, 2018.

History

Name change

On June 17, 2011, Cavium Networks, Inc. changed their name to Cavium, Inc.http://biz.yahoo.com/e/110620/cavm8-k.html

Acquisitions by Cavium

Acquisition of Cavium

In November 2017, Cavium's board of directors agreed to the company's purchase by

for $6 billion in cash and stock. The merger was finalized on July 6, 2018.

NSA Interference

On March 23, 2022, Cavium was named as an NSA "enabled" CPU vendor in a PhD thesis titled "Communication in a world of pervasive surveillance". The "enabled" term refers to a process with which a chip vendor has a backdoor introduced into their designs.

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

VPN Virtual private network (VPN) is a network architecture for virtually extending a private network (i.e. any computer network which is not the public Internet) across one or multiple other networks which are either untrusted (as they are not c ...

s. 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-procesoor from the Octeon-line. In 2014, the company announced the ThunderX, a 48 core server SoC based on the

ARMv8 ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of RISC instruction set architectures (ISAs) for computer processors. Arm Holdings develops the ISAs and lice ...

architecture. Cavium also offered

ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

switches that were produced in cooperation with Xpliant since 2014.

References

{{Authority control Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States Networking companies of the United States Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq Companies based in San Jose, California Electronics companies established in 2001 American companies established in 2001 Fabless semiconductor companies 2018 mergers and acquisitions American corporate subsidiaries Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct networking companies Networking hardware companies Defunct computer hardware companies