Scaling to Meet High Growth Opportunities in the Semiconductor Industry

Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the semiconductor industry is experiencing significant growth, with chip sales expected to rise 19.7 percent  to $527 billion in 2021, according to World Semiconductor Trade Statistics. As Marvell’s CIO, I have supported our company’s own incredible transformational journey and seen our market value skyrocket 18X, from $2.5 billion to nearly $45 billion as of this writing.

A big part of my job is ensuring that our company is equipped with the most scalable and secure IT infrastructure possible to empower employees to do their best work and to help facilitate even faster innovation.

Toward that end, I am pursuing three key strategic objectives:

1: Support next phase of growth at scale. The future of the semiconductor business lies in emerging markets such as 5G, automotive, cloud and enterprise data centers, and we need to do all that we can to ride this next wave of opportunity. Enabled by a cloud-first strategy and new digital technologies, the objective is to provide global, scalable, and secure infrastructure for increasingly complex chip designs and capacity-constrained semiconductor supply chains.

Specifically, our IT organization has partnered with internal support functions to drive innovation and transform business operations. Most recently, we worked with our supply chain and sales teams to identify and drive intelligent process automation using Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Additionally, using new “digital workers”, we are now reducing productivity gaps. We are on track to achieve 5,000-plus hours of manual savings due to the rollout of these digital workers, and we are poised to autonomously resolve about 20 percent  of our IT tickets using digital assistant technology based on AI/NLP technology.

2: Secure the borderless enterprise: Protecting intellectual property against rising nation-state threats is a top priority. We are laser focused on securing our supply chains and third-party service providers, while also protecting against insider threats.

As part of this effort, we workhand-in-hand with our partners and various government agencies, as semiconductor IP is under growing threats. With heightened sensitivity around foreign access to, and theft of, intellectual property, we work with regulators to deploy rigorous security controls.

3. Expedite flexible workplace transformation: We are expediting the use of innovative digital technologies and flexible workplace designs—such as robotic process automation, blockchain, chatbots and reimagined workplace designs—to enhance productivity and provide an integrated, seamless, collaborative, safe and secure hybrid workplace for our employees.

"A big part of my job is ensuring that our company is equipped with the most scalable and secure IT infrastructure possible to empower employees to do their best work and to help facilitate even faster innovation"

I am also a member of our company’s strategic engineering leadership group, which partners with internal R&D teams to help drive innovation. We help engineering teams strategize their product portfolios. Marvell’s latest portfolio of “borderless” enterprise products, ARM-based data processor unit (DPU) solutions in the cloud, embedded AI/ML technologies, and telemetry and blockchain-based security solutions relied heavily on the IT team for help during the product specifications phase.

This is an extremely exciting time for the semiconductor industry, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for our industry.