Broadcom

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Broadcom Corporation

Type	Public NASDAQ: BRCM
Founded	August 1991
Headquarters	Irvine, California, USA
Key people	Henry Samueli, Co-founder, Chairman, CTO Henry Nicholas, Co-founder Scott A. McGregor, CEO, President
Industry	Semiconductors
Revenue	$2.67 billion USD ( $411.7M FY 2005)
Employees	4,287 (2007)
Website	www.broadcom.com

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.

1 Products
- 1.1 Consumer design wins
- 1.2 Problems with Linux
2 Manufacturing
3 Stock options scandal
4 References
5 External links

[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 DS and 802.11g for the Wii . More specifically, Broadcom will provide Bluetooth connectivity for Wii's controller.

[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) does include an open-source driver for some of Broadcom's WiFi chipsets, 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.^[1] On January 24, 2007, it announced a restatement of its financial results from 1998 to 2003 that totaled $2.24 billion.