| Type | Public |
|---|---|
| Traded as | NASDAQ: BRCM NASDAQ-100 Component S&P 500 Component |
| Industry | Semiconductors Electronics |
| Founded | August 1991 |
| Founder(s) | Henry Nicholas Henry Samueli |
| Headquarters | Irvine, California, U.S. |
| Key people | Scott A. McGregor (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 |
| Revenue | US$ 6.818 billion (2010)[1] |
| Operating income | US$ 1.082 billion (2010)[1] |
| Net income | US$ 1.082 billion (2010)[1] |
| Total assets | US$ 7.944 billion (2010)[1] |
| Total equity | US$ 5.826 billion (2010)[1] |
| Employees | 9,690 (Q3 2011) |
| Website | Broadcom.com |
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.[2] In 1998, Broadcom became a public company on the NASDAQ exchange (ticker symbol: BRCM) and now employs approximately 9,690 people worldwide in more than 15 countries.
Broadcom is among Gartner's Top 10 Semiconductor Vendors by revenue.[3] In 2010, Broadcom's total revenue was $6.82 billion. In 2011, Broadcom was No. 343 on the Fortune 500, climbing 117 places from its 2010 ranking of No. 460.[4] Broadcom first landed on the Fortune 500 in 2009.
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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.[5] Broadcom also shut down its Blu-ray chip business. The closure of these businesses began on September 19, 2011.
Broadcom also provides components for a number of high-profile consumer devices:
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.[6] Since the release of the 2.6.26 kernel some Broadcom chips have kernel support but require external firmware to be built.
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 Valley, Cambridge (UK), Bangalore and Hyderabad in India, Richmond (near Vancouver) and Markham (near Toronto) in Canada, and Sophia Antipolis in France.
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.[7] On January 24, 2007, it announced a restatement of its financial results from 1998 to 2003 that totaled $2.24 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.[8] 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.[9]
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.[10]
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.
In 2003, the Free Software Foundation accused Broadcom of violating the GNU General Public License. Broadcom distributed GPL code in a driver for its 802.11g router chipset without making that code public; a violation of terms of the GPL. 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.[11]
Broadcom authored its own VoIP codecs in 2002, and released them as open source with LGPL license in 2009:[12]
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.[13]
Besides a big deal above, through the years, Broadcom has acquired many smaller companies to quickly enter new markets.[14]
| 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[15] |
| 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)[16] | Xilleon DTV processor chips, software and TV tuners |
| December 2009 | Dune Networks[17] | $178M in cash | High speed network switches |
| February 2010 | Teknovus[18] | $123M in cash | Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) chipsets and software |
| June 2010 | Innovision Research & Technology plc[19] | $47.5M in cash | Near field communication expertise and IP |
| October 2010 | Beceem Communications[20] | $316M in cash | 4G LTE/WiMax expertise |
| November 2010 | Gigle Networks [21] | $75M in cash | Multimedia home networking |
| April 2011 | Provigent Ltd.[22] | $313M in cash | Microwave Backhaul |
| May 2011 | SC Square Ltd.[23] | $41.9M in cash | Israel-based security software developer |
| September 2011 | NetLogic Microsystems | $3.7 billion | Next-generation Internet networks |
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