Expand: date=July 2008

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 consumersFact: date=February 2008 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 and Hyderabad in India, Vancouver and Markham in Canada, and Sophia Antipolis in France.