The Marvell Prestera-MX Devices Are the Industry's Highest Performance Ethernet Switches to Support 10 Gb/s Speeds and Advanced Networking Features.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 3, 2001

Marvell Continues Leadership Position in Ethernet, IP and MPLS 

Silicon Solutions With Its Sixth Generation Switching ICs

Marvell (NASDAQ:MRVL), a technology leader in the development of extreme broadband communications solutions, today unveiled the Prestera(TM)-MX family of packet processor switching ICs, setting a new standard for merchant silicon by supporting advanced features such as Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) and traffic management at speeds of 10 Gb/s. Merging high speeds with enhanced benefits such as privacy, sophisticated billing mechanisms, and the ability to guarantee Service Level Agreements (SLAs), the Prestera-MX620 and Prestera-MX630 products are the premiere solution for metropolitan edge and access switches.

The Marvell Prestera-MX packet processors allow system manufacturers to achieve significantly higher board density and lower power consumption, improving two key metrics for metropolitan systems typically constrained by rack space. Offering the flexibility of either a ten-Gigabit Ethernet Media Access Controller (MAC) interface in the Prestera-MX630 or ten one-Gigabit Ethernet MAC interfaces in the Prestera-MX620, and integrating a sophisticated classification engine, traffic manager and queue scheduler, these packet processors combine into one chip the functionality typically shared among at least four separate devices.

"Leveraging the powerful networking engine of the Prestera-MX packet processor and the extensive software vendor support, Marvell's customers can easily and rapidly add many exciting networking features such as MPLS and security," said Gary Smerdon, Marvell's Vice President of Marketing for the Communications Business Group. "Combined with our very successful Discovery(TM) system controllers and industry-leading Alaska(TM) Gigabit and 10 Gigabit physical layer and SERDES products, Marvell offers customers a complete suite of world-class Ethernet solutions."

Stated Bob Wheeler, Senior Analyst at The Linley Group, "Marvell's Prestera-MX products are the first packet processing ICs on the market to support such a rich range of functionality at 10 Gb/s speeds. System manufacturers should see a significant reduction in their design cycle, as the Marvell Prestera architecture allows advanced features to be enabled through simple register-based configuration. This significantly reduces the extensive software development and verification effort required with network processors."

One key feature of the Prestera-MX packet processor is its classification engine that supports over one million flows, more than 1000 times that of other competitors' products. By classifying packets for the first 128 bytes of a packet -- over 50% more bytes than many competitors -- the Marvell Prestera-MX products provide more sophisticated routing and billing for metropolitan customers. For example, systems using the Marvell Prestera-MX packet processor now have the ability to track, route and bill based on MPLS tags and not just based on IP or MAC addresses. In addition, by supporting over one million IP flows and 64,000 counters per device, service providers can track and bill more customers in finer detail, enabling better service quality and increased revenue potential.

"For switch manufacturers in the rapidly growing metropolitan market, MPLS remains a vital feature," said Michael McDonald, Marvell's Director of Marketing for the Prestera family of switching products. "The Prestera-MX products are the only devices on the market to natively support MPLS at 10 Gb/s speeds. Using these features, network administrators can experience increased functionality including setting up low-cost and highly scalable virtual private networks (VPNs), a powerful element in securing the privacy of traffic flowing across the Internet, and a key element for any company with remote offices or employees."

A unique feature found in both the Prestera-MX products is the full support of the Differentiated Services (DiffServ) standard. By employing eight queues per port, or double that of other devices in this class, the Prestera devices allow system manufacturers to establish different profiles for different types of traffic. Examples of different profiles include voice traffic, which requires low latency, low jitter, and low bandwidth, delay-sensitive mission critical traffic and lower priority drop-sensitive data traffic. Additional profiles can be determined to differentiate customer-support, web and enterprise resource planning (ERP) traffic.

Software Support

The Prestera-MX products are fully compatible with future Prestera packet processors, such as the upcoming Prestera EX family of enterprise products. This enables rapid software development and shortened time-to-market for Marvell customers.

"Our high-end routing and MPLS stacks will complement the Marvell Prestera family of products and will significantly enhance the time-to-market for high-end metro equipment manufacturers," stated Ashish Basu, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Future Communications Software. "Our wide range of offerings, which include both control plane and data plane stacks, align well with the Prestera products. The combination will help OEMs fulfill the various requirements for building a complete system."

"The compelling 10 Gigabit-based feature set in the Marvell Prestera-MX device provides IP Infusion with the opportunity to offer an attractive system-level solution for the broadband communications and MAN market," said Nick Keating, President and CEO of IP Infusion. "Marvell and IP Infusion plan to deliver fully integrated routing and switching solutions for IPv4, IPv6, MPLS, and VPN environments to reduce OEMs' development costs and accelerate their time-to-revenue."

"The compatibility of Marvell's products, combined with the solid functionality of its chips, will allow customers to leverage LVL7's portable FASTPATH software to develop broadband access networking products and bring them to market faster and at a lower cost," commented Kishore Jotwani, Vice President of Marketing for LVL7, a network processing software company.

Other software companies that have provided support for the Marvell Prestera family of products include RADLAN, Inc., Wind River Systems, Inc., Data Connection Limited, OSE Systems, and QNX Software Systems.

The Marvell Prestera-MX Products

The Marvell Prestera-MX family includes a powerful multi-layer flow classifier and Quality of Service engine. Specific features include support of 8 priority queues with Weighted Random Early Discard (WRED) capability, advanced scheduling and bandwidth management, extensive DiffServ support through IP-TOS-based priority and TOS rewriting, IEEE 802.1p-based priority, as well as other features.

The Prestera-MX products also support an advanced Layer 3 routing engine in hardware with support for longest prefix match for IPv4 addresses, IP multicast routing, equal-cost and weighted-cost path routing, and IP-VPNs. In addition, forward compatibility with IPv6 is provided.

The Prestera-MX products integrate an MPLS engine that can be used within a Label Edge Router (LER) or a Label Switch Router (LSR), as well as provide support for MPLS-based VPNs.

Layer 4 traffic engineering is also included in the Prestera-MX family of products, with support for network address and port translation and Layer 4 switching and load balancing.

In addition, the Prestera-MX products support all of the standard Layer 2 switching features including VLANs based on MAC, port, subnet, and protocol; link aggregation and port trunking; multiple spanning tree; and advanced security and filtering including port-based access control.

Availability

The Marvell Prestera-MX products are available in two configurations. The Prestera-MX620, the 98MX620, supports ten ports of one Gb/s Ethernet and MPLS. This device is priced at $590. in 1K quantities. The Prestera-MX 630, the 98MX630, supports a single port of ten Gb/s Ethernet and MPLS. This device is priced at $670. in 1K quantities. Both the 98MX620 and 98MX630 devices are both packaged in a 901-pin plastic BGA and consume approximately seven watts in many system configurations. Sampling will occur in the fourth quarter of 2001.

About Marvell

Marvell, a technology leader in the development of extreme broadband system-level IC solutions for Internet connectivity and infrastructure, comprises Marvell Technology Group Ltd. (MTGL) and its subsidiaries, including Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. (MSI), Marvell Asia Pte Ltd. (MAPL), Marvell Japan K.K. (MJKK), Marvell International Ltd. and Galileo Technology Ltd. (GTL). On behalf of MIL, MSI designs and develops integrated circuits utilizing proprietary Communications Mixed-Signal Processing (CMSP) and digital signal processing technologies for communications signal processing markets. MAPL is headquartered in Singapore and is responsible for production, distribution and design services. GTL develops high-performance communications Internetworking and Switching products for the broadband communications market. As used in this release, the terms "Company" and "Marvell" refer to the entire group of companies. The Company applies its technology to the extreme broadband communications market where its products are used in network access equipment to provide the interface between communications systems and data transmission media. MSI is headquartered at 645 Almanor Ave., Sunnyvale, Calif., 94085; phone: [phone], fax: [phone]. Marvell's common stock is traded on the NASDAQ under the symbol MRVL. More information on Marvell is available on the Internet at www.marvell.com.

Safe Harbor Statement of Marvell under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: This release may contain forward-looking statements based on our current expectations, estimates and projections about our products, our industry, our markets, management's beliefs, and certain assumptions made by us. Words such as "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "plans," "believes," "seeks," "estimates," "may," "will," "should," and variations of these words or similar expressions, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. In addition, any statements that refer to expectations, projections or other characterizations of future events or circumstances, including any underlying assumptions, are forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Therefore, market results may differ materially and adversely from those expressed in any forward-looking statements in this release.

Important risks, uncertainties and assumptions that may cause such a difference for Marvell in connection with the introduction of its Prestera(TM)-MX family of 10 Gigabit switching products for the data communications market and for Marvell's customers in connection with their commercial exploitation of this product's potential advantages as highlighted herein include, but are not limited to, the timing, cost and successful completion of technology and product development through volume production; the rate at which our present and future customers and end-users adopt this product; the timing and results of customer-industry qualification and certification of our products; and, the timing, pricing, rescheduling, or cancellation of significant customer orders for our Prestera-MX family of 10 Gigabit switching products.

For other factors that could cause Marvell's results to vary from expectations, please see the sections titled "Additional Factors That May Affect Future Results" in Marvell's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended January 27, 2001 and in Marvell's quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended July 27, 2001.

We undertake no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements for any reason.