Marvell Ushers In the 1.6T Era with Expanded Optical DSP Platform Portfolio, Redefining AI Data Center End-to-End Connectivity
Multi-generational, Industry-leading DSPs, Advanced SerDes and Industry's Broadest End-to-End Connectivity Portfolio Position Marvell as the Driving Force in Next-gen AI Infrastructures
Marvell Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:MRVL), a leader in data infrastructure semiconductor solutions, today announced a major expansion of its 1.6T optical DSP platform portfolio, advancing the industry's transition from 800G into 1.6T next-generation AI data center connectivity.
Marvell has a multi-generational history of industry firsts. The company was the first to introduce 200G/lane 1.6T DSPs in 5nm with Marvell® Nova in 2023, followed by the 3nm 1.6T Ara platform in 2024, which increased performance and reduced the power envelope as the demand for 1.6T modules expanded in 2025. Now shipping in mass volume to global customers, Ara is enabling the world's hyperscalers and cloud providers to deploy 1.6T pluggable connectivity for AI data centers.
Today, Marvell is introducing the next wave of its 3nm 1.6T optical DSP platform portfolio, increasing performance per watt by optimizing separately for each high-volume use case and introducing new capabilities, including:
- Ara T, the first 8x200G transmit-retimed optics (TRO) DSP, delivers improved power efficiency and reduced total cost of ownership in network deployments.
- Ara X, the first 1.6T DSP with advanced link reliability capabilities, enables customers to achieve higher resilience for optical networks.
- Petra, the first 3nm 8x100G to 4x200G gearbox, enables high power efficiency and unlocks new, more flexible infrastructure designs.
- Aquila M, the first O-band-optimized, coherent-lite optical DSP with integrated media access control security (MACsec), adds critical built-in security to next-generation optical links.
As AI infrastructure scales exponentially, connectivity has become the primary bottleneck of the modern data center, and the solution requires more than a "one-size-fits-all" approach. New, dedicated semiconductor interconnect solutions are required to address the increasing performance, power, design, security and application-specific challenges. With these new 1.6T offerings and an unmatched breadth and depth of expertise—and offering a full connectivity stack including industry-first DSPs, advanced SerDes, switching, interconnects, drivers and TIAs, and the Marvell® RELIANT™ interconnect telemetry platform—Marvell is uniquely positioned to address this demand.
"Marvell pioneered PAM DSP technology, and we continue to lead with advanced SerDes and production-proven 800G platforms. We are now extending that multi-generational product leadership into the 1.6T era," said Xi Wang, senior vice president and general manager, Connectivity Business Unit at Marvell. "With these new products, Marvell will deliver the performance, power efficiency and manufacturing capacity required to keep up with the explosive growth of next-generation AI data centers."
"The performance of today's data centers—powered by hundreds of thousands of GPUs, XPUs and other advanced compute engines—depends on the interconnect technologies that link them together," said Vladimir Kozlov, founder and CEO at LightCounting. "Marvell DSP products are essential to many high-speed links in modern data center infrastructure, enabling compute resources to operate at peak performance and efficiency. The company's expanded 1.6T DSP portfolio ensures that data centers can fully maximize their compute investments well into the future."
Broadest End-to-End Connectivity Portfolio
Marvell delivers the industry's most comprehensive portfolio of connectivity platform solutions for scale-up, scale-out and scale-across AI infrastructure, with a vast global installed base across hyperscale and cloud deployments and millions of high-speed lanes deployed worldwide.
The Marvell portfolio spans the full data center connectivity stack, including DSPs, SerDes, switching, interconnects, drivers and TIAs to support all systems, devices, links and nodes across the network. The new offerings announced today extend the company's existing 1.6T portfolio, which includes Marvell Ara, Alaska® and Nova DSPs, its Ethernet PHY platform, the Silicon Photonics Light Engine and the LPO TIA and laser driver chipset.
Marvell also provides supporting system-level technologies such as the Marvell RELIANT interconnect telemetry platform, which helps customers reduce operational complexity and improve network reliability and performance.
Last week, Marvell announced the expansion of its multi-generational 1.6T ZR/ZR+ and coherent DSP technology portfolio, underscoring the company's commitment to continually deliver the latest scale-up, scale-out and scale-across technologies to drive AI innovation.
Availability
Marvell Ara X, Ara T, Petra and Aquila M DSPs are sampling to customers beginning in Q1 2026.
Marvell will showcase its end-to-end connectivity portfolio at OFC 2026, March 15–19, at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California. Visit the Marvell booth #1600 to learn how the company is driving the next generation of data center and AI infrastructure.
About Marvell
To deliver the data infrastructure technology that connects the world, we're building solutions on the most powerful foundation: our partnerships with our customers. Trusted by the world's leading technology companies for over 30 years, we move, store, process and secure the world's data with semiconductor solutions designed for our customers' current needs and future ambitions. Through a process of deep collaboration and transparency, we're ultimately changing the way tomorrow's enterprise, cloud and carrier architectures transform—for the better.
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