Broadcom

Broadcom Corporation is a leading 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 3,700 people worldwide.

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Broadcom's product line spans computer-networking from top to bottom: 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/WCDMA).

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The company also produces ICs for carrier access equipment, audio/video processors for digital set-top boxes and digital video recorders, Bluetooth transceivers, and RF receivers/tuners for satellite TV. Major customers include Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Dell, Lenovo, Logitech, Cisco Systems and TiVo.

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Broadcom is known as a fabless company. It outsources all semiconductor manufacturing to Asian merchant foundries, such as TSMC, SMIC, Silterra, and UMC. The company is based in Irvine, California, with other research and development sites in Silicon Valley and Bangalore, India.

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In Q2 2005, Broadcom Corporation announced a strategic partnership to provide wireless technology for Nintendo's next generation gaming systems. Broadcom will be offering Nintendo its ?online solution on a chip? as deployed in millions of notebooks and PDAs across the globe, enabling Nintendo wireless connectivity in its next-generation consoles.

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Integrated circuit: An integrated circuit (IC) is a thin chip consisting of at least two interconnected semiconductor devices, mainly transistors, as well as passive components like resistors. As of 2004, typical chips are of size 1 cm2 or smaller, and contain millions of interconnected devices, but larger ones exist a...

1991: 1991 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar....

Henry Samueli: Henry Samueli, Ph.D., is the co-founder, chairman, and chief technology officer of the Broadcom Corporation and a noted philanthropist in the Orange County, California community. The schools of engineering at both UC Irvine and UCLA, where he is a tenured professor, bear his name. In June 2005 he bo...