Galileo Technology

Communications chips from the Galilee

Galileo Technology was founded in 1993, led by Avigdor Willenz, together with Manuel Alba, whom he knew from IDT and who served as president of the company's American arm. Eyal Waldman, who came from Intel, was one of its founders and served as vice president of engineering; he later left to found Mellanox. The company operated in Karmiel and then in Manof in the Galilee, alongside operations in the United States. Willenz came to it after working at Elbit and at the American chip company IDT. Its field was designing components for communications systems: chips that move data between computers and between networks. Galileo sold the design as a product to equipment makers, and handed the manufacturing itself to outside factories. According to a Globes report when the sale was announced, its chips were made mainly in Taiwan, while the company's management was in Israel.

What the chips did

The business idea was to supply communications equipment makers with components they could build into their products, instead of developing every component themselves. A Globes investigation described how this outsourcing became part of how companies in the industry worked. Galileo's product families included chips for network switches and system controllers. In its announcement that the acquisition was completed, Marvell mentioned the GalNet and Horizon families and the work in local, metropolitan and wide area networks. These are components inside communications equipment, which let the equipment maker build a product around ready-made data transfer capabilities. The end user saw the switch or the communications system, while Galileo's chip worked inside it.

IPO and the agreement with Marvell

Galileo went public on Nasdaq in 1997. On 17 October 2000, Marvell announced an agreement to acquire it in a stock deal, which Globes reported at about $2.7 billion. According to the announcement, Galileo shareholders were to receive Marvell shares in exchange for their shares. The published amount described the value of the shares at the time of the announcement, not a fixed cash payment. Marvell worked in storage components and in communications, and the acquisition of Galileo was meant to expand its communications business. In the background was also Galileo's competition with Broadcom, described in accounts by former employees in the Globes investigation.

Completing the acquisition: the milestone

On 22 January 2001, Marvell announced that the acquisition was completed and that Galileo had become a wholly owned subsidiary. The announcement said the business would continue in Manof and in San Jose, and that sales of Galileo products would be reported as part of Marvell's communications revenue. Galileo's business became the spearhead of Marvell's entry into communications chips, and in 2011 about 1,100 people worked at Marvell's development center in Israel. According to Globes, the base built by Galileo and Marvell helped create an Israeli center of knowledge in communications chips, which spread to many other companies, including Mellanox, founded by Galileo alumnus Eyal Waldman in 1999. The sale moved the business to other owners, but the knowledge and the people kept working in the industry.

Legacy

Willenz stayed at Marvell as a vice president and director and retired in April 2002, according to a Globes interview. Later he was one of the investors in Annapurna Labs, which was sold to Amazon in 2015, and the first investor and chairman of Habana Labs, which was sold to Intel in 2019. In 2026 Calcalist described him as "the chief architect of the Israeli chip industry." Mellanox grew on a separate path, led by Waldman and his partners. In this way Galileo's legacy continued both inside Marvell and in new companies that people who had worked there founded or invested in. Galileo operated as a chip company without a factory: the design was done in Israel, manufacturing was handed to suppliers in Taiwan, and the chips were sold to communications equipment makers, including Cisco.