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Broadcom

Broadcom Corporation is an American supplier of integrated circuits (ICs) for broadband communications. Founded in 1991 by Henry Samueli (chairman and CTO) and Henry Nicholas, it became a public company in 1998 and now employs over 6,800 people worldwide.

Broadcom is among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders.

History

Henry Samueli and Henry T. Nicholas III founded Broadcom in 1992 in Los Angeles. The company was moved to Irvine only three years later.

Logo

The logo comprises bold black text upon a red waveform which takes a shape similar to a sinc function.

Products

Broadcom's product line spans computer and telecommunication networking: the company has products for enterprise/metropolitan high-speed networks, as well as products for SOHO (small-office, home-office) networks. Products include transceiver and processor ICs for ethernet and wireless LANs, cable modems, digital subscriber line (DSL), servers, home networking devices (router, switches, port-concentators) and cellular phones (GSM/GPRS/EDGE/W-CDMA). It is also known for a series of high-speed encryption co-processors, offloading this processor intensive work to a dedicated chip, thus greatly speeding up any tasks that utilize encryption. This has many practical benefits for e-commerce, and PGP or GPG secure communications.

The company also produces ICs for carrier access equipment, audio/video processors for digital set-top boxes and digital video recorders, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi transceivers, and RF receivers/tuners for satellite TV. Major customers include Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, IBM, Dell, Lenovo, Linksys, Logitech, Nintendo, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nortel, TiVo and Cisco Systems.

Broadcom also authored its own VoIP codecs in 2002:

BroadVoice 16 with declared bitrate 16 kbit/s and audio sampling frequency 8 kHz
BroadVoice 32 with declared bitrate 32 kbit/s and sampling rate of 16 kHz (note hovewer that X-Lite SIP phone's menu declares bitrate 48000 b/s)

Consumer design wins

While Broadcom's primary business is strictly as an IC supplier to OEMs, the Broadcom moniker is known to home consumers through several high-profile consumer devices:

Broadcom supplies the video processor chip for Apple's 5th generation iPod.
In Q2 2005, Broadcom Corporation announced it would be providing Nintendo its “online solution on a chip” as deployed in millions of notebooks and PDAs across the globe, enabling Nintendo 802.11b connectivity with DS and 802.11g for the Wii. More specifically, Broadcom would provide Bluetooth connectivity for Wii's controller.

Broadcom and Linux

Some open source drivers are available for the 802.11 B/G family of wireless chips Broadcom produces.. However, these drivers lack the ability to connect to WPA drivers and require a binary firmware to be loaded into the card for use.

Manufacturing

Broadcom is known as a fabless company. It outsources all semiconductor manufacturing to Asian merchant foundries, such as Chartered, SMIC, Silterra, TSMC, and UMC. The company is based in Irvine, California in the University Research Park on the University of California, Irvine campus, after a 2007 move from its previous campus near the Irvine Spectrum. It also has other research and development sites in Silicon Valley and Bangalore, Hyderabad in India.

Stock options scandal

On July 14, 2006, Broadcom announced it had to subtract $750,000,000 from earnings due to stock options irregularities. On September 8, 2006 the amount was doubled to $1.5 billion. The company may also owe additional taxes. On January 24, 2007, it announced a restatement of its financial results from 1998 to 2003 that totaled $2.24 billion.

On May 15, 2008, Samueli , Broadcom CTO, resigned as chairman of the board and took of a leave of absence as Chief Technology Officer after being named in a civil complaint by the SEC.

On June 5, 2008, Broadcom co-founder and former CEO Henry Nicholas III was indicted on charges of illegal stock-option backdating and of violations of federal narcotics laws.

Qualcomm Suit

In June 2007, the U.S. International Trade Commission blocked the import of new cell phone models based on particular Qualcomm microchips. They found that these Qualcomm microchips infringe patents owned by Broadcom. Broadcom has also initiated patent litigation in U.S. courts over this issue.

At issue is software designed to extend battery life in chips while users make out-of-network calls. In October, an ITC administrative judge made an initial ruling that Qualcomm violated the Broadcom patent covering that feature and the commission later affirmed the decision.

Acquisitions

Through the years, Broadcom has acquired many smaller companies to quickly enter new markets.

Date	Acquired Company	Amount	Expertise
January 1999	Maverick Networks	$104M in Stock	Multi-layer switches for corporate networks
April 1999	Epigram	$316M in stock	home networking using POTS
June 1999	Amedia Labs	$20M	SOC design services
August 1999	HotHaus Technologies	$280M in stock	DSP software for VOIP
August 1999	Altocom	$180M in stock	Softmodem software
January 2000	BlueSteel Networks	$123M in stock	Security Processors
March 2000	Digital Furnace Corp	$136M in stock	Data compression software
March 2000	Stellar Semiconductor	$162M in stock	3D graphics processors
June 2000	Pivotal Technologies	$242M in stock	digital video chips
July 2000	Innovent Systems	$500M in stock	blue-tooth radios
August 2000	Puyallup Integrated Circuit Company		components for SOC chips
July 2000	Altima Communications	$533M in stock	networking chips
October 2000	Newport Communications	$1240M in stock	10Gbit Ethernet transceivers
October 2000	Silicon Spice	$1000M in stock	DSP chips for VOIP
November 2000	Element 14	$594M in stock	DSL chipsets
December 2000	Allayer Communications	$271M in stock	enterprise and optical networking chips
December 2000	Sibyte	$2000M in stock	Broadband microprocessors
January 2001	VisionTech, Ltd.	$777M in stock	MPEG-2 compression/decompression of PVRs
January 2001	ServerWorks Corp.	$1003M in stock	system controllers for compute servers
July 2001	PortaTec Corporation		next-generation portable devices
July 2001	Kimalink		circuits for wireless communications
May 2002	Mobilink Telecom, Inc.	5.6M shares of stock	base-band processor for cell-phones
March 2003	Gadzoox Networks	$5.8M in cash	Storage-area networks
January 2004	RAIDCore, Inc.	$16.5M in cash	software for RAID systems
April 2004	M-Stream Inc.	$8.7M in cash and 27000 shares of stock	technology to improve wireless reception
April 2004	Sand Video, Inc.	$77.5M in stock and $7.4M in cash	video compression technology
April 2004	WIDCOMM, Inc.	$49M in cash	software for Bluetooth systems
April 2004	Zyray Wireless, Inc.	$96M in stock	Base-band processors for WCMDA
September 2004	Alphamosaic, Ltd.	$123M in stock	video processors for mobile devices
February 2005	Alliant Networks, Inc.		cellular gateway products
March 2005	Zeevo, Inc.	$26.4M in cash and $2.6M in stock	Bluetooth headset products
July 2005	Siliquent Technologies, Inc.	$76M in cash	10Gbit Ethernet interface controllers
October 2005	Athena Semiconductors, Inc.	$21.6M in cash	Digital TV tuners and Wifi technology
January 2006	Sandburst Corporation	$75M in cash and $5M in stock	SOC chips for ethernet packet switching
November 2006	LVL7 Systems, Inc.	$62M in cash	Networking software
May 2007	Octalica, Inc.	$31M in cash	Provider of Multimedia Over Coax technology
June 2007	Global Locate, Inc.	$146M in cash	Provider of Industry-Leading GPS Chips and Software
March 2008	Sunext Design, Inc.	$48M in cash	Provider of optical disk drive technologies
August 2008	AMD (DTV Processor Division)	$192M in cash	Provider of DTV Processor chips, software and TV tuners

A list of acquisitions is also provided here

GPL Violations

In 2003, the Free Software Foundation caught Broadcom committing a GPL (or GNU General Public License) violation. Broadcom distributed open source code in a driver for its 802.11g router chipset without making that code public; a violation of terms of the GPL. The chipset was adopted by Linksys which was later purchased by Cisco. Cisco eventually published source code for the firmware for its WRT54G wireless broadband router.