Broadcom headquarters at UC Irvine's University Research Park
 

Broadcom Corporation is a fabless semiconductor company in the wireless and broadband communication business. The company is headquartered in Irvine, California, USA. Broadcom was founded by a professor-student pair Henry Samueli and Henry T. Nicholas III from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) at Los Angeles, California in 1991. In 1995, the company moved from its Westwood, California, office to Irvine, California. In 1998, Broadcom became a public company on the NASDAQ exchange (ticker symbol: BRCM) and now employs approximately 11,300 people worldwide in more than 15 countries.

 

Broadcom is among Gartner's Top 10 Semiconductor Vendors by revenue. In 2012, Broadcom's total revenue was $8.01 billion. In 2011, Broadcom was No. 343 on the Fortune 500, climbing 117 places from its 2010 ranking of No. 460. Broadcom first landed on the Fortune 500 in 2009. The Broadcom logo was designed by Eliot Hochberg, based on the logo for the company's previous name, Broadband Telecom. The Broadband Telecom logo was designed by co-founder Henry Nicholas' then wife Stacey Nicholas, who was inspired by the mathematical 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(Avaya), TiVo and Cisco Systems. In September 2011, Broadcom shut down its digital TV operations. Broadcom also shut down its Blu-ray chip business. The closure of these businesses began on September 19, 2011.

 

NICs and networking

All major hardware vendors include (amongst other vendors like Intel) Broadcom NICs in their workstation and server-products. Even when hardware vendors implement Ethernet NICs on the motherboard they are marketed as Broadcom. For example the Dell blade-switch M610 has two embedded Gigabit NetXtreme 5709 NICs.

 

Trident+ ASIC

Another large market is hardware for switches: some vendors offer switching equipment based on Broadcom hardware and firmware (e.g. Dell PowerConnect classics) while other well-known vendors do use the Broadcom hardware but write their own firmware. The latest Broadcom Trident+ ASIC is used in many high-speed / 10Gb+ switches from the largest switch-vendors such as: Cisco Nexus switches running NX-OS, or the Dell Force10 running FTOS. Also the Arista 7050S the IBM/BNT 8264 and Juniper QFX3500 are all based on the Trident+ ASICs.

 

Consumer design components

Broadcom also provides components for a number of high-profile consumer devices:

 

• Broadcom supplies the WiFi+Bluetooth combo chip for Apple iPhone 3GS and iPod touch second generation.

• 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.

• In 2012 Broadcom started producing systems on the chips and first system on chip which produced by Broadcam is BC28155 which used in Samsung Galaxy S II Plus and Samsung Galaxy Grand.

 

Notable employees

• Sharukh Shaikh, the prince of ranebennur

• Henry Samueli

• Gottfried Ungerboeck, inventor of trellis coded modulation

• Henry T. Nicholas III

• Sophie Wilson, designer of the ARM CPU instruction set

• Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language

 

Broadcom and Linux

Some open source drivers are available and included in the Linux kernel source tree 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.

 

In 2003, the Free Software Foundation accused Broadcom of not complying with the GNU General Public License as Broadcom distributed GPL code in a driver for its 802.11g router chipset without making that code public. 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.

 

In 2012, the Linux Foundation listed Broadcom as one of the Top 10 companies contributing to the development of the Linux Kernel for 2011, placing it in the top 5 percent of an estimated 226 contributing companies. The foundation's Linux Kernel Development report also noted that, during the course of the year, Broadcom submitted 2,916 changes to the kernel. In October, Broadcom's commitment to the free software community was underlined when the previously proprietary parts of the Raspberry Pi userland were released under a BSD-style license, making it "the first ARM-based multimedia SoC with fully functional, vendor-provided (as opposed to partial, reverse engineered) fully open-source drivers", although this claim has not been universally accepted.

 

Manufacturing

Broadcom is known as a fabless company. It outsources all semiconductor manufacturing to Asian merchant foundries, such as GlobalFoundries, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, Silterra, TSMC, and United Microelectronics Corporation. 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 has many other research and development sites including Silicon Fen, Cambridge (UK), Bangalore and Hyderabad in India, Richmond (near Vancouver) and Markham (near Toronto) 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 2005 that totaled $2.22 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 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

 

On June 5, 2008, Broadcom co-founder and former CEO Henry Nicholas and former CFO William Ruehle were indicted on charges of illegal stock-option backdating. Nicholas was also indicted for violations of federal narcotics laws. However, in December 2009, federal judge Cormac J. Carney threw out the options backdating charges against Nicholas and Ruehle after finding that federal prosecutors improperly tried to prevent three defense witnesses from testifying.

 

Qualcomm litigation and settlement

On April 26, 2009, Broadcom settled four years of legal battles over wireless and other patents with Qualcomm Inc., another fabless semiconductor company headquartered in San Diego, California, USA.

 

The deal ended the patent litigation as well as complaints of anti-competitive behavior before trade commissions in the U.S., Europe and South Korea. As part of the settlement, Qualcomm is paying $891 million in cash to Broadcom through April 2013.

 

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.

 

BroadVoice

For other uses, see BroadVoice.

Broadcom authored its own VoIP codecs in 2002, and released them as open source with LGPL license in 2009:

 

• 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 80000 bit/s)

 

Acquisitions

In September 2011, Broadcom bought NetLogic Microsystems for a $3.7 billion deal in cash, excluding around $450 million of NetLogic employee shareholdings, which will transfer to Broadcom.

 

Besides a big deal above, 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 telephone wiring
June 1999	Armedia Inc.	$67.2M in stock	Digital Video Decoders
August 1999	HotHaus Technologies	$280M in stock	DSP software for VOIP
August 1999	Altocom	$180M in stock	Software modem 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	Bluetooth radios
August 2000	Puyallup Integrated Circuit Company		IC design and IC macro blocks
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	I/O controllers for servers and workstations
July 2001	PortaTec Corporation		Mobile devices
July 2001	Kimalink		Wireless and mobile ICs
May 2002	Mobilink Telecom, Inc.	$5.6M shares of stock	Baseband processors for cellphones
March 2003	Gadzoox Networks	$5.8M in cash	Storage-area networks
January 2004	RAIDCore, Inc.	$16.5M in cash	RAID software
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	Baseband processors for WCDMA
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	Multimedia Over Coax technology
June 2007	Global Locate, Inc.	$146M in cash	GPS chips and software
March 2008	Sunext Design, Inc.	$48M in cash	Optical disk drive technologies
August 2008	AMD (DTV Processor Division)	$141.5M in cash (Original deal was $192.8M)	Xilleon DTV processor chips, software and TV tuners
December 2009	Dune Networks	$178M in cash	High speed network switches
February 2010	Teknovus	$123M in cash	Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) chipsets and software
June 2010	Innovision Research & Technology plc	$47.5M in cash	Near field communication expertise and IP
October 2010	Beceem Communications	$316M in cash	4G LTE/WiMax expertise
November 2010	Gigle Networks	$75M in cash	Multimedia home networking
April 2011	Provigent Ltd.	$313M in cash	Microwave Backhaul
May 2011	SC Square Ltd.	$41.9M in cash	Israel-based security software developer
September 2011	NetLogic Microsystems	$3.7 billion	Next-generation Internet networks
March 2012	BroadLight	$230M in cash	Israel-based fiber access PON developer
June 2012	Wisair	$1M in cash	Short-range Wireless data transmission