Broadcom

For the company formerly known as Avago Technologies, see Broadcom Limited.
Broadcom Corporation
Subsidiary
Industry Semiconductors
Electronics
Fate Became a wholly owned subsidiary of Broadcom Limited after being acquired by Avago Technologies
Founded August 1991 (1991-08)
Founders Henry Nicholas
Henry Samueli
Headquarters Irvine, California, United States
Key people
 Hock E. Tan
(President & CEO)
Henry Samueli
(CTO)
Products Integrated Circuits
Cable Converter Boxes
Gigabit Ethernet
Wireless networks
Cable modems
Mobile communications
Network Switches
Digital Subscriber Line
Server farms
Processors
Bluetooth
VoIP
Near Field Communication
GPS
Metropolitan Area Network
Parent Broadcom Limited
(2016–present)
Website www.broadcom.com

Broadcom Corporation was an American fabless semiconductor company that made products for the wireless and broadband communication industry. It was acquired by Avago Technologies in 2016 and currently operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of the merged entity called Broadcom Limited. The division is headquartered in Irvine, California. Broadcom Corporation was founded by professor-student pair Henry Samueli and Henry Nicholas from UCLA in 1991. In 1995 the company moved from its Westwood, Los Angeles office to Irvine, California.[1] In 1998, Broadcom became a public company on the NASDAQ exchange (ticker symbol: BRCM) and now employs approximately 11,750 people worldwide in more than 15 countries.

Broadcom is among Gartner's Top 10 Semiconductor Vendors by revenue.[2] Broadcom first landed on the Fortune 500 in 2009. In 2012, Broadcom's total revenue was $8.01 billion. In 2013, Broadcom stood at No. 327 on the Fortune 500, having climbed 17 places from its 2012 ranking of No. 344.[3]

In May 28, 2015 chip maker Avago Technologies Ltd. agreed to buy Broadcom Corp. for $37 billion in cash and stock. At closing, which completed on February 1, 2016,[4] Broadcom shareholders will hold 32% of the new Singapore-based company to be called Broadcom Limited. Hock Tan, Avago President and CEO, will be the new CEO of the new combined company. Dr. Samueli will be Chief Technology Officer and member of the combined company's board. and Dr. Nicholas will serve in a strategic advisory role within the new company.[5][6] The new merged entity is named Broadcom Limited but inherits the ticker symbol AVGO. The BRCM ticker symbol was retired.

In May 2016 Cypress Semiconductor announced that it will acquire Broadcom Corporation's full portfolio of IoT products for $550 million. Under the deal, Cypress acquires Broadcom's IoT products and intellectual property for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and ZigBee connectivity, as well as Broadcom's WICED platform and SDK for developers. The deal combines Broadcom's developer tools and connectivity technologies for IoT devices with Cypress' own programmable system-on-a-chip (SoC) products that provide memory, computing, and graphics processing for low-power devices.[7]

Products

Broadcom produces the system on a chip for the line of popular Raspberry Pi single-board computers.

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/LTE). 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, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, IBM, Dell, Asus, Lenovo, Linksys, Logitech, Nintendo, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nortel(Avaya), TiVo, Tenda, and Cisco Systems. In September 2011, Broadcom shut down its digital TV operations.[8] Broadcom also shut down its Blu-ray chip business. The closure of these businesses began on September 19, 2011.

On June 2, 2014, Broadcom announced intentions to exit the cellular baseband business.[9]

NICs and networking

Vendors have included Broadcom NICs in their products. For example, the Dell blade-server M610 has two embedded Gigabit NetXtreme 5709 NICs.[10]

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,[11] Dell Force10 (now Dell Networking) running FTOS/DNOS,[12][13] all Arista 7050-series switches,[14] the IBM/BNT 8264, and Juniper QFX3500.[15]

The latest 'member' of the Trident family is the Trident II XGS which can support up to 32 x 40G ports or 104 x 10G ports (or a mix of both) on a single chip.[16][17] Examples of switches using this Trident II XGS chip are the Dell Networking S6000,[18] Cisco Nexus 9000[19] and some smaller vendors like: EdgeCore AS6700, Penguin Arctica 3200XL or QuantaMesh T5032[20]

Graphics processing unit

VideoCore is the GPU found on some systems-on-a-chip (SoC)s by Broadcom, the most widely known one being the BCM2835 containing VideoCore IV found in the Raspberry Pi.

Video acceleration

Broadcom Crystal HD does video acceleration.

Consumer design components

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

Notable employees

Broadcom and Linux

Some free and 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.[22] 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 under the GPL-license.[23][24]

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.[25] 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, according to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, "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.[26]

Broadcom provided a Linux driver for their Broadcom Crystal HD, and they also hired Eric Anholt, a former Intel employee, to work on a free and open-source graphics device driver for their VideoCore IV.

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 million 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.[27] On January 24, 2007, it announced a restatement of its financial results from 1998 to 2005 that totaled $2.22 billion.[28]

On May 15, 2008, Broadcom CTO Samueli resigned as chairman of the board and took 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.[29] 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.[30]

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.[31]

The deal ended the patent litigation as well as complaints of anti-competitive behavior before trade commissions in the United States, Europe, and South Korea. As part of the settlement, Qualcomm paid $891 million in cash to Broadcom over a four-year period ending June 2013.[32]

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:[33]

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.[34]

Besides the NetLogic Microsystems acquisition, through the years, Broadcom has acquired many smaller companies to quickly enter new markets.[35]

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, WiFi
June 1999 Armedia Inc. $67.2M in stock Digital Video Decoders[36]
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
November 2000 SiByte, Inc $2060M in stock[37] MIPS, Broadband microprocessors
December 2000 Allayer Communications $271M in stock Enterprise and optical networking chips
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)[38] Xilleon DTV processor chips, software and TV tuners
December 2009 Dune Networks[39] $178M in cash High speed network switches
February 2010 Teknovus[40] $123M in cash Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) chipsets and software
June 2010 Innovision Research & Technology plc[41] $47.5M in cash Near field communication expertise and IP
October 2010 Beceem Communications[42] $316M in cash 4G LTE/WiMax expertise
November 2010 Gigle Networks[43] $75M in cash Multimedia home networking
April 2011 Provigent Ltd.[44] $313M in cash Microwave Backhaul
May 2011 SC Square Ltd.[45] $41.9M in cash Israel-based security software developer
September 2011 NetLogic Microsystems $3.7 billion Next-generation Internet networks
March 2012 BroadLight[46] $230M in cash Israel-based fiber access PON developer
June 2012 Wisair $1M in cash Short-range Wireless data transmission
January 2013 BroadLogic video encoders/decoders,[47] QAM modulation and wideband receivers
September 2013 Renesas Mobile Corporation $164M in cash Mobile chipset platforms (LTE-Related Assets)
2013 LSI $6.6 billion[48]
2014 Emulex $609 million[49]
2016 Brocade Communications Systems $5.9 billion[50]

Branding

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.

Raspberry Pi

Broadcom organizes the fabrication of the processor chip (most recently the BCM2837 chip) which is used by the charitable Raspberry Pi foundation.[51] The foundation requested help from Broadcom making the Raspberry Pi card, a motherboard which is free of DRM or corporate control of any kind, which can interact with hardware, and which can be bought and controlled by children, when educators in Cambridge were worrying that "Something had changed the way kids were interacting with computers. A number of problems were identified: the colonisation of the ICT curriculum with lessons on using Word and Excel, or writing webpages; the end of the dot-com boom; and the rise of the home PC and games console to replace the Amigas, BBC Micros, ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 machines that people of an earlier generation learned to program on."

References

  1. ↑ Kotkin, Joel (January 24, 1999). "Grass Roots Business; A Place To Please The Techies - New York Times". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-04-25.
  2. ↑ Deffree, Suzanne (April 19, 2011). "Broadcom moves on to top 10 list as 2010 semi revenue records more than 30% growth". EDN.com. Archived from the original on December 23, 2011. Retrieved 2011-05-05.
  3. ↑ "Broadcom - Fortune 500 2013 - Fortune". Fortune. May 6, 2013. Retrieved 2013-05-06.
  4. ↑ "Investor Center".
  5. ↑ "Avago Agrees to Buy Broadcom for $37 Billion".
  6. ↑ "Avago Technologies to Acquire Broadcom for $37 Billion".
  7. ↑ BI Intelligence, Business Insider. “Cypress Semiconductor acquires Broadcom's IoT chip business.” May 4, 2016. May 9, 2016.
  8. ↑ Junko Yoshida, EE Times. "Broadcom closes DTV, Blu-ray chip businesses." September 22, 2011. Retrieved October 4, 2011.
  9. ↑ "Investor Center".
  10. ↑ Technical specs on the Dell PowerEdge M610, visited January 27, 2012
  11. ↑ Cisco rolls out Nexus 3000, visited January 28, 2012
  12. ↑ The Register on Force10 cranks Ethernet switches to 40 Gigabits, April 23, 2011; visited January 28, 2012
  13. ↑ Jason Edelman Blog on 40 Gbps datacenter switching, December 10, 2011. Retrieved May 17, 2012
  14. ↑ The Register: Arista punts 10/40 GbE juice-sipper, visited May 18, 2012
  15. ↑ Lightreading Re:Some Pizza, April 30, 2012. Visited: May 18, 2012
  16. ↑ The Register: Broadcom launches Trident 2 chip, 27 August 2012. Visited: 29 April 2014
  17. ↑ Broadcom presentation/press-release: STRATAXGS® TRIDENT II, created: 24 August 2012. Embargoed till: 28 August 2012. Visited: 28 April 2014
  18. ↑ SDN Central: VMWare bridges NSXS..., published September 2013. Visited: 28 April 2014
  19. ↑ Lippis Report, published on Cisco website:Cisco Nexus 9000, visited: 28 April 2014
  20. ↑ Cumulus Networking 40Gbps Quick Reference Guide, visited: 28 April 2014
  21. ↑ Broadcom To Give Rival A Run For Its Money. UTSanDiego.com (2013-05-09). Retrieved on 2013-12-08.
  22. ↑ b43 Sipsolutions.net, Linux Wireless
  23. ↑ "Linksys routers caught up in open source dispute". TechTarget. October 20, 2003.
  24. ↑ Lyons, Daniel (October 14, 2003). "Linux's Hit Men - Forbes.com". Forbes. Retrieved January 28, 2012.
  25. ↑ Linux Kernel Development report
  26. ↑ "Raspberry Pi maker says code for ARM chip is now open source". Ars Technica. Retrieved 3 November 2012.
  27. ↑ "Broadcom's Options Bombshell". BusinessWeek. September 9, 2006. Archived from the original on March 23, 2007. Retrieved 2006-09-09.
  28. ↑ "A $2.2 Billion Charge at Broadcom". The New York Times. January 24, 2007. Retrieved 2012-02-15.
  29. ↑ "Drugs, hookers and cranked customers: Ex-Broadcom boss indicted". The Register. June 5, 2008. Retrieved 2008-06-06.
  30. ↑ Flaccus, Gillian. Broadcom backdating case dismissed. Associated Press via San Francisco Chronicle, 2009-12-16.
  31. ↑ Jones, Ashby (April 27, 2009). "All Quiet on the Western Front: Broadcom, Qualcomm Reach $891M Deal". Law Blog. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2011-08-06.
  32. ↑ "Qualcomm and Broadcom Reach Settlement and Patent Agreement". Broadcom. Retrieved 12 July 2013.
  33. ↑ "Broadcom offers LGPL Voice Codecs".
  34. ↑ "Broadcom buys NetLogic for $3.7bn". Retrieved September 12, 2011.
  35. ↑ "A list of acquisitions". Broadcom.com.
  36. ↑ P.J. Huffstutter (June 2, 2009). "Broadcom Acquires Armedia, Maker of Digital Video Decoders". Los Angeles Times.
  37. ↑ Broadcom acquires MIPS core provider SiByte. Design-reuse.com. Retrieved on 2013-12-08.
  38. ↑ "Broadcom Completes Acquisition of Digital TV Business from AMD for $50M less". Broadcom.com. October 28, 2008.
  39. ↑ "Broadcom to buy Dune Networks for butt switches". News.techworld.com.
  40. ↑ "Broadcom to acquire Teknovus". Broadcom.com. March 8, 2010.
  41. ↑ "Broadcom to enter NFC market, buys Innovision for $47.5m". Nearfieldcommunicationsworld.com.
  42. ↑ "Broadcom.com". Broadcom.com. October 13, 2010.
  43. ↑ "Broadcom.com". Broadcom.com. November 22, 2010.
  44. ↑ "Broadcom.com". Broadcom.com.
  45. ↑ / Broadcom Completes Acquisition of SC Square Ltd.
  46. ↑ "/ Broadcom Enters Agreement to Acquire BroadLight". Broadcom.com.
  47. ↑ Broadcom snags BroadLogic. Cedmagazine.com (2013-01-30). Retrieved on 2013-12-08.
  48. ↑ Broadcom takes next step in chipmaker consolidation. MSN Money (2016-11-02). Retrieved on 2016-11-04.
  49. ↑ Broadcom takes next step in chipmaker consolidation. MSN Money (2016-11-02). Retrieved on 2016-11-04.
  50. ↑ Broadcom takes next step in chipmaker consolidation. MSN Money (2016-11-02). Retrieved on 2016-11-04.
  51. ↑ "Raspberry Pi Foundation - About Us". Retrieved 2016-01-01.

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