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Broadcom
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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 7,400 people worldwide.
Broadcom is among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders.
lass="link1" onMouseover='showByLink("m2310026",this)' onMouseout='hide("m2310026")'href="http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Henry_Samueli">Henry Samueli and Henry T. Nicholas III founded Broadcom in 1992 in Los Angeles. The company was moved to Irvine three years later.
logo comprises bold black text upon a red waveform which takes a shape similar to a sinc function.
dcom'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.
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Encyclopedia
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 7,400 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 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-concentrators) 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 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 however 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 802.11b/g/a/n family of wireless chips Broadcom produces.. Since the release of the 2.6.26 kernel some Broadcom chips have kernel support but require external firmware to be built.
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, Bangalore & Hyderabad in India, Vancouver in Canada and Sophia Antipolis in France.
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.
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.
Acquisitions
Through the years, Broadcom has acquired many smaller companies to quickly enter new markets.
| Date | Acquired Company | Amount | Expertise |
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| 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) | $141.5M in cash (Original deal was $192.8M) | Provider of DTV Processor chips, software and TV tuners |
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