Marvell Doubles Down on Automotive Ethernet

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SANTA CLARA, Calif., May. 07, 2019 – 

In deciding to buy Aquantia Corp. for about $452 million, Marvell Semiconductor is moving to bolster its position in the Ethernet IC market. In particular, it is betting that Aquantia's automotive Ethernet technology will be widely adopted by autonomous vehicle makers to enable on-board networking.

Future Level 4 and Level 5 autonomous vehicles will need in-vehicle connectivity at multi-gigabit speed to move a massive volume of data generated by the host of high-resolution sensors including vision, LiDARs, and radars that they will require. Aquantia's proprietary AQcelerate PHYs and controllers support Ethernet speeds of up to 10 Gbps over twisted-pair automotive cables.

Aquantia was the first company to market multi-gig PHYs rangings from 2.5 Gbps to 10 Gbps over copper. Aquantia has competition now, however. Last August, the MIPI Alliance (which counts dozens of leading IC vendors among its members) announced that preparations were underway on the development of a MIPI A-PHY specification of a 12- to 24-Gbps data interface specifically for the automotive industry.

According to Bob Wheeler, a principal analyst at the Linley Group, the acquisition by Marvell is a speculative play, as the AQcelerate product line currently generates very little revenue. But the technology does have a number of design wins, he added.

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