Broadcom
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| Broadcom Corporation
<tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align:center; padding:16px 0 16px 0;">Image:Logo-broadcom.gif</td></tr> | |
| Type | Public NASDAQ: BRCM |
|---|---|
| Founded | August 1991 |
| Headquarters | Image:Flag of the United States.svg Irvine, California, USA
<tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Key people</th><td>Henry Samueli, Co-founder, Chairman, CTO |
Broadcom Corporation is a leading 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 4,000 people worldwide.
Broadcom is among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders.
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[edit] 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 Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Dell, Lenovo, Linksys, Logitech, Cisco Systems and TiVo.
Broadcom also authored its own VoIP codecs in 2002:
- BroadVoice 16 with declared bitrate 16 Kb/s and audio sampling frequency 8 kHz
- BroadVoice 32 with declared bitrate 32 Kb/s and sampling rate of 16 kHz (note hovewer that X-Lite SIP phone's menu declares bitrate 48000 b/s)
- For other uses, see BroadVoice.
[edit] Consumer design wins
While Broadcom's business is strictly as a IC supplier to equipment manufacturers, Broadcom's company-name 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 will 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 Wii and NDS. More specifically, Broadcom will provide Bluetooth connectivity for Wii's controller.
- The Linksys (802.11G) wireless routers allow a greater degree of customization and configurability, through the loading of third-party open-source firmware.
[edit] Problems with Linux
Broadcom's wireless cards are known to have several problems with Linux. Users of these cards may have trouble setting them up in Linux. [1] Though now, the Linux kernel(as of 2.6.17) includes an open-source driver for some of Broadcom's WIFI chipsets, however it is a detection-only driver and requires the end-user to "rip" firmware from a Broadcom-supplied Windows driver. Users have reported that this often does not work.
[edit] 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, with other research and development sites in Silicon Valley and Bangalore, India.
[edit] 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.<ref>Broadcom's Options Bombshell. BusinessWeek (2006-09-09). Retrieved on 2006-09-09.</ref>
[edit] References
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