Inphi's chips sat in the gaps between other chips, where signals blur as data moves faster. The Santa Clara company designed high-speed analog parts that kept those signals clean, first for server memory and then for the optical links that tie data centers together. It started in November 2000 as TCom Communications and took the Inphi name a few months later. It went public in November 2010, as cloud companies were building data centers at record pace.

Analog in a Digital World

Most chip startups of its era chased digital logic. Inphi chose analog, the hard craft of moving electrical and light signals at the edge of what physics allows. It was fabless, designing chips and paying factories to build them. Its early money came from memory interface chips for servers. The bet was that every jump in data speed would make clean signals harder to deliver, and that the companies that could deliver them would be paid well.

Marvell Buys the Light

Inphi priced at $12 a share in November 2010 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as IPHI. The stock rose 27.5 percent on its first day. Inphi then moved deeper into optical chips for cloud data centers and telecom networks. Marvell Technology bought the company in April 2021 in a cash and stock deal worth about $10 billion.

Cover: The Boston Clipper, Lightning, P. Giles. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a clipper ship named Lightning (speed).