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Powering the AI and 5G Era: Expert Insights from Navin Bishnoi of Marvell Technology
Semiconductors have become the backbone of the global digital economy. From AI-driven cloud platforms and 5G networks to enterprise systems and smart infrastructure, today’s chips determine how fast, secure, and energy-efficient our digital world can be. With the industry projected to approach the trillion-dollar mark by 2030, innovation in chip design has never been more critical.
In the latest Analytics Insight podcast episode, Host Priya Dialani sits with Navin Bishnoi, AVP of Data Center Engineering and India Country Manager at Marvell Technology, to understand how the twin forces of AI and 5G are accelerating semiconductor evolution. With decades of expertise in custom silicon and data infrastructure, Bishnoi delves deep into the technological, strategic, and economic forces that will shape this industry.
Marvell Technology: Building the Foundation of Data Infrastructure
Marvell Technology is a global semiconductor solutions company for data infrastructure. Its portfolio spans from processing and networking to storage and security, enabling how data is generated, moved, stored, and protected across an ever-growing AI, cloud, enterprise, and 5G ecosystem.
Unlike traditional merchant silicon vendors, Marvell has a strong presence in custom silicon, working closely with hyperscalers, enterprises, and OEMs to design chips optimized for specific workloads. This approach helps customers achieve better power efficiency, performance, and total cost of ownership, critical requirements in modern data centers and AI infrastructure.
Marvell India, with major R&D centers in Bengaluru, Pune, and Hyderabad, plays a key role across the entire semiconductor value chain, from IP and Chip design to software enablement and system-level integration.
Semiconductors: The Hidden Backbone of the Digital Economy
Navin views semiconductors as a digital infrastructure foundation. Applications and platforms may be what users interact with, but beneath each such act of creation, consumption, or connection are chips processing, moving, and securing data.
The pandemic and related supply chain disruptions, coupled with increasing geopolitical complexity, have suddenly thrown semiconductors into sharp focus for both governments and industries. Economies are rapidly digitizing, not least in countries like India, so that chips underpin everything from governance systems to consumer services, making them strategically vital.
AI, Custom Silicon, and the Rise of XPUs
Artificial Intelligence has changed the paradigm of chip design. Modern AI workload requires domain-specific accelerators such as GPU, DPU, NPU, TPU, and so on. These processors are large, power-consuming, and contain billions of transistors, hence requiring highly customized architectures.
These XPUs are designed from scratch by Marvell directly with hyperscalers, starting with workload needs and optimizing for performance, power, and cost. Ensuring chips are purpose-built rather than one-size-fits-all is best provided by this whiteboard-to-silicon approach.
Networking and Optics: Conquering the Next AI Bottleneck
While computing has progressed rapidly, according to Navin, it is networking that stands as the bottleneck today. In large AI systems, data can spend nearly half its time moving between processors rather than being computed.
To that end, Marvell is driving innovation for high-speed networking and optical technologies, including copper and photonics-based solutions. Emerging co-packaged optics technologies, among others, bring optical connectivity closer to the chip for higher bandwidth, lower latency, and better energy efficiency, critical for scaling AI infrastructure.
Energy Efficiency and Sustainable Data Centers
Modern data centers are no longer measured in square feet but in megawatts and gigawatts of power consumption. Energy efficiency is now a hard constraint rather than just a design goal.
Marvell prioritizes optimizing both peak and idle power consumption to help data centers scale their AI workloads without hitting power and cooling limits. According to Bishnoi, sustainable semiconductor design will be key to the future of AI-driven infrastructure.
Security by Design: From Chip Architecture to Supply Chain
Security cannot be an afterthought anymore, with the sensitive personal, enterprise, and national data flowing through the digital systems. Navin outlines three layers of security:
Secure development environments to protect IP and R&D processes.
Hardware-level security architectures are a breed of solutions embedded directly into chips.
Supply chain security, anti-tampering during manufacturing and deployment
This end-to-end security model makes sure that semiconductor lifecycles have built-in trust, resilience, and integrity.
Leadership in the Data-Driven Semiconductor Era
The Semiconductor world is in the process of changing from the traditional way of creating chips (bottom-up) to using system-level chip design (top-down). Today's leaders need to bring together hardware, software, networking, cooling, and power, and design them into a single system.
AI is playing an increasingly important role in chip design, helping engineers create chips faster, make decisions based on more data, and innovate more quickly with new architectures. For a company to be successful, it requires working closely with many different types of companies — vendors, governments, universities, and ecosystem partners.
Conclusion
According to Navin Bishnoi, “The next wave of breakthroughs will come via custom silicon, advanced networking, and optical interconnects, enabling AI systems to operate at scale with greater efficiency and more sustainability.”
We are entering an era of Custom, Connected, and Intelligent Silicon. The convergence of AI, the cloud, and 5G will continue to change how companies operate and build the infrastructure for the digital economy. The vast majority of users will likely never realize that they are working with semiconductors, but semiconductors are key to enabling a smarter, faster, and more integrated world.
For additional insights about the impact of AI and 5G on the semiconductor industry, please listen to the complete podcast conversation on the Analytics Insight Podcast.
