Cavium, Inc. was a fabless semiconductor company based in San Jose, California, specializing in ARM-based and MIPS-based network, video and security processors and SoCs. 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, 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 on July 6, 2018.

History

Name change

On June 17, 2011, Cavium Networks, Inc. changed their name to Cavium, Inc.

Acquisitions by Cavium

Acquisition of Cavium

In November 2017, Cavium's board of directors agreed to the company's purchase by Marvell Technology Group 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 VPNs. 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 architecture. Cavium also offered ethernet switches that were produced in cooperation with Xpliant since 2014.