Editor’s Be aware: Henry Samueli is the 2025 recipient of the IEEE Medal of Honor. IEEE Spectrum revealed this profile of Samueli within the September 1999 difficulty.
With the current explosion within the reputation of cable and digital subscriber-line modems for high-speed Internet access, the chances are that you’ll quickly have considered one of these broadband communications gadgets in your house or workplace—if you happen to don’t already. In the event you do, the chances are that the chips contained in the modem could have been designed by Broadcom Corp., and be based mostly on digital signal-processing (DSP) architectures conceived by Henry Samueli.
Eight years in the past, Samueli, then a professor on the College of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who had been pushing the cutting-edge of digital broadband communications for greater than a decade, joined along with his Ph.D. pupil Henry Nicholas to discovered Broadcom, now in Irvine, Calif. Their first challenge was to design the world’s first chips for digital interactive tv.
Immediately Samueli holds patents for DSP-based receiver architectures for quite a lot of digital communications transceivers, together with ones for cable tv, satellite tv for pc tv, Ethernet, and high-bit-rate digital subscriber line companies. Plus Broadcom now makes greater than 95 % of the chips that go into U.S. digital cable set-top containers and cable modems. Such modems are considered as the muse for the way forward for information, voice, and video companies to the house.
Broadcom additionally has massive chunks of the markets for chips for Ethernet transceivers, high-definition tv (HDTV) receivers, digital subscriber line modems (the main various to cable modems), and direct broadcast satellite tv for pc receivers.
How a DIY radio equipment launched Henry Samueli’s profession
Samueli’s path towards changing into considered one of at present’s key gamers in digital communications began 33 years in the past, when he was a seventh grader. Required to take a store class at his West Hollywood, Calif., junior highschool, he chosen electrical store. Through the time period, every pupil was anticipated to construct a crystal radio from a equipment, utilizing a single crystal and an antenna wound on a rest room paper tube. Uninterested in the prospect, Samueli requested his trainer if, as a substitute, he may construct a five-tube short-wave radio he had examine in a Heathkit catalog. [Editor’s note: Samueli later determined that the kit was a Graymark 506B.]
Initially, the trainer mentioned no—the short-wave radio was a ninth grade challenge—however Samueli endured and finally prevailed. It wasn’t simple, although it was a cookbook challenge. Samueli had by no means completed something prefer it, and he recollects slaving away on it each
night time all time period. Lastly, he introduced the assembled equipment to high school, the trainer plugged it in, and it labored. “The trainer’s jaw hit the ground,” Samueli mentioned. “He mentioned no person will get it proper the primary time.” The trainer predicted that Samueli could be a profitable electrical engineer sometime. It was the primary time Samueli had heard of such a career.
The radio challenge had fascinated him. Although he had managed to place it collectively, he had no concept the way it labored. “That grew to become my mission in life, from seventh grade onward, to learn the way radios work,” he informed IEEE Spectrum. It took him 9 years of faculty, a Ph.D. thesis—a extremely theoretical paper entitled “Nonperiodic compelled overflow oscillations in digital filters”—and some years in business earlier than he felt he had glad that purpose.
In pursuit of this understanding, Samueli utilized to UCLA, which had a great engineering division. It was additionally inexpensive as a result of he may reside along with his mother and father. (His mother and father, Holocaust survivors from Krakow, Poland, who operated a sequence of small companies in Los Angeles, have been dedicated to supporting his schooling however couldn’t afford to ship him away to high school.) After he acquired his grasp’s diploma at UCLA, he went straight by to a Ph.D. program, turning down a job supply from the then Bell Phone Laboratories, in Murray Hill, N.J.
The protection business beckons
With the completion of his doctoral thesis, Samueli joined a pal as a member of the technical workers at TRW, in Redondo Seashore, Calif.
“Within the late ’70s and early ’80s, the protection business was at its peak,” he recalled. “All the highest college students on the native faculties went into protection. Hughes and TRW have been the highest two—you nearly didn’t think about another firm.”
At TRW, Samueli was initially assigned to a communications methods group that was analyzing the wartime survivability of U.S. communications networks. A 12 months later, he was moved right into a design group that was creating circuit boards for army satellite tv for pc and radio communications methods.
His first project in that place was difficult. “I needed to design a communications processor field,” he recalled. This field was a part of a transmitter/receiver for a digital hyperlink in a NASA floor station. It was one of many first purposes of DSP expertise to a satellite communications system.
“Since in these days every chip contained only a few features (like a four-bit adder or a quad flip-flop), you needed to join up lots of or hundreds of such digital logic chips to really construct an inexpensive system,” Samueli mentioned. “It was overwhelmingly complicated, this pretty giant field of {hardware} with about 1200 logic chips and a number of other LSI [large-scale integration] multiplier chips that I needed to get working all on my own, with solely a technician to assist. They successfully threw me into the ocean and informed me to sink or swim.”
“I came upon later,” he mentioned, “that my boss didn’t assume I may do it. He had given me the project as a check, considering that I might finally yell for assist.” Samueli had been given 4 months to finish the duty; he did it in two and a half.
“I’m Mr. Good Man. I’m not confrontational. So I get very pissed off when one thing goes fallacious as a result of I don’t prefer to yell at folks.”—Henry Samueli
After that, he was given his choose of any challenge within the division. He selected a contract to design a high-speed digital radio modem for the U.S. Military—a challenge that set him on the trail that finally led to the founding of Broadcom. This was a 26-Mb/s microwave digital radio, which, being constructed with digital circuits, pushed the bounds of expertise at a time when typical digital radios have been designed round analog circuits. Succeeding required designing the quickest digital adaptive equalizer—a circuit that corrects for distortions—ever constructed.
Peter McAdam, director of superior expertise for TRW’s electronics and expertise division, was a number of administration layers above Samueli on the time, however he recollects this challenge.
“We have been designing digital radios,” McAdam informed Spectrum,” and he was doing digital sign demodulators for them. He applied them utilizing digital phase-lock-loop expertise earlier than the remainder of the world had considered doing such a factor. We didn’t have to do this a part of it digitally, however he pushed it—he insisted we may do it, and received us all inventing algorithms to take action.”
The lure of academia
Since becoming a member of TRW in 1980, Samueli had been concurrently educating school engineering programs in his spare time—first at California State College, Northridge, after which at UCLA. In 1985 UCLA provided him a full-time place.
Samueli jumped on the likelihood. “Not that I didn’t like TRW. To today I feel it was the most effective jobs I may have had. Working within the protection business, you might be given all the cash and sources you want with the intention to develop the best, state-of-the-art expertise. However the alternative to be a professor at one of many prime universities on the earth was too good to move up.”
The very best a part of academia, Samueli thinks, is working with college students. “They’re so energetic and hardworking and motivated to be taught,” he mentioned. “It’s a thrilling setting.”
“Coming from a Jewish household,” he mused, “the large push was to change into a medical physician. However working in a hospital round sick folks all day versus working at a college the place you’ve gotten all these brilliant keen younger minds—there may be simply no comparability.”
The opposite bonus of the college setting is tutorial freedom. “You choose a topic and go for it. You must increase the cash, however no person tells you what to do.”
Nicolaos G. Alexopoulos, now dean of engineering on the College of California, Irvine, was the chair of UCLA’s electrical engineering division throughout Samueli’s tenure. He recalled that Samueli was good at getting company analysis grants and donations.
“I had created a company associates program for the division,” Alexopoulos mentioned, “and Henry should have raised a number of million {dollars} in gear donations and affiliate memberships. He was profitable as a result of the companies associated to his work, revered his analysis, and will inform he had real curiosity in serving to the division, not simply himself.”
At UCLA, Samueli launched a analysis program in making use of IC expertise to high-speed digital communications, constructing on the digital modem challenge he had accomplished at TRW. The primary Ph.D. pupil to hitch his group was Henry Nicholas, a chip designer from TRW who was engaged on his doctorate half time. Nicholas’s chip design background complemented Samueli’s methods structure background, and he grew to become a companion in constructing the analysis group, which, at its peak, had 15 graduate college students.
Broadcom cofounders Henry Samueli [left] and Henry Nicholas pose in entrance of the corporate’s headquarters in Irvine, Calif., in 1999. Ted Soqui/Corbis/Getty Photos
Nicholas complemented Samueli in one other method, because the partnership continued, with the later founding of Broadcom.
“The 2 are good cop/dangerous cop,” McAdam informed Spectrum. “Henry [Samueli] is admittedly gentle, very nice. In a aggressive setting he may be too good. However Nick [Henry Nicholas] takes care of that, thanks very a lot.”
Others who’ve labored with the 2 of them agree. And Samueli himself sees Nicholas as the perfect steadiness to his laid-back character. “I’m Mr. Good Man,” he informed Spectrum. “I’m not confrontational. So I get very pissed off when one thing goes fallacious as a result of I don’t prefer to yell at folks.”
“Nick, alternatively,” he mentioned, “isn’t shy about yelling. And also you want any person like that to run a profitable company. It has turned out to be an incredible partnership; we’re complementary in each respect.”
Henry Samueli’s first start-up
In 1988, along with his UCLA analysis program in full swing, pushing digital communications chips to increased and better speeds, Samueli received a telephone name from two of his former TRW co-workers.
They have been beginning an organization, PairGain Applied sciences, in Tustin, Calif., to construct digital subscriber line (DSL) transceivers, and so they wanted a chief architect. Their preliminary product operated at integrated-services digital community (ISDN) speeds (128 kb/s), which have been customary on the time. However the firm then made a technological leap by creating a high-bit-rate DSL (HDSL) transceiver that operated at 1.5Mb/s over atypical telephone traces.
Ben Itri, now chief expertise officer of PairGain, was behind the hassle to recruit Samueli. “We would have liked somebody who may give us credibility in a theoretical space,” Itri mentioned. “What we have been proposing had adaptive digital filters, and Henry had completed plenty of work in that space.” (Adaptive digital filters appropriate for the distortion that happens when a broadband digital sign is distributed over the phone community, which is optimized for analog voice communications.)
“He additionally gave us entry to a pool of proficient folks at UCLA,” Itri informed Spectrum. “After he was on board, we pitched the corporate to enterprise capitalists. They revered his background. With out him, it could have been very tough.”
Whereas the PairGain job was of curiosity to Samueli, he was not prepared to go away UCLA, so he signed on as a one-day-a-week PairGain guide. He instantly introduced Nicholas on board, who added a PairGain submit to his already busy schedule of TRW work and Ph.D. analysis at UCLA. Samueli labored on the structure, Nicholas launched a chip design group, and the corporate’s first product, the pioneering HDSL transceiver, was launched in 1991. PairGain subsequently achieved about an 80 % market share for HDSL transmission gear—the containers that enable the set up of high-speed digital connections between companies and their native telephone corporations.
“I received inventory choices to hitch PairGain,” Samueli mentioned. “I had no concept what that meant on the time, however, boy, did I be taught fast.” PairGain went public in 1993, and Samueli’s inventory subsequently grew to become value a number of million {dollars}.
How Broadcom received its begin
In the meantime, Samueli’s analysis group at UCLA was designing all kinds of digital communications chips, utilizing novel algorithms to implement issues like QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) modems and equalizers that had by no means earlier than been completed digitally. Subsequent he proposed creating ICs for an all-digital modem that will function at a number of hundred megabits per second, which was far past current digital modem speeds. Samueli revealed his leads to over 100 papers and spoke at quite a few conferences, and lots of corporations have been taken with making use of this work to actual merchandise.
“Folks have been calling us up and saying, ‘That was a extremely attention-grabbing chip design you revealed. Have you ever thought of commercializing it?’ ” Samueli mentioned. In 1991 he determined to attempt. He and Nicholas included Broadcom, arrange the corporate in Nicholas’s spare bed room, and signed improvement contracts with Scientific Atlanta, Intel, TRW, and the U.S. Air Pressure. Samueli stored his UCLA submit and his PairGain consulting job, hiring his graduate college students as consultants to implement a lot of the preliminary work at Broadcom.
“I had three enterprise playing cards: UCLA professor, chief scientist of PairGain, and vice chairman of analysis and improvement of Broadcom.” (Nicholas, who might have had higher enterprise and negotiating abilities, grew to become Broadcom’s president and chief govt officer; the 2 are co-chairmen of the corporate.)
The contract for Scientific Atlanta, of Norcross, Ga., clearly pushed the cutting-edge. New York Metropolis-based Time Warner was making ready to deploy an formidable check of interactive digital television companies in Orlando, Fla., and Scientific Atlanta had contracted with the corporate to construct the world’s first digital cable set-top field. (Current cable set-top containers have been analog.) What was wanted was a chip-based modem to function the cable sign receiver for that digital field.
Broadcom accomplished the modem in 1994 in three chips, at a time when different digital modems stuffed many circuit boards. Samueli received a patent for the work on the all-digital cable receiver structure. Utilizing Broadcom’s design, Scientific Atlanta constructed 2,000 cable containers for the Orlando area trial. Whereas the trial was a technical success, it was a advertising and marketing failure. Time Warner quietly pulled the plug on the challenge, and no person talked about interactive TV for a number of years. Solely now could be the ubiquity of the World Wide Web making interactive TV a marketable product.
On reflection, the Time Warner check seems to have been about 5 years too early. Immediately, Internet TV merchandise that merge TV viewing with Net entry carry out lots of the features envisioned by Time Warner years in the past.
Broadcom’s contract with Intel Corp., of Santa Clara, Calif., was for a chip implementing a 100-Mb/s Ethernet transceiver for a local-area community (LAN), utilizing DSP methods. (Out there Ethernet chips on the time had a prime pace of 10 Mb/s.) The chip, which shipped in 1995, grew to become the primary DSP-based transceiver for LANs. The corporate just lately introduced a 1-Gb/s Ethernet chip based mostly on comparable DSP expertise.
For TRW, Broadcom designed a digital frequency synthesizer chip for a army satellite tv for pc software. Beneath the Air Pressure contract, Broadcom’s workers developed an anti-jam filter chip for a World Positioning System satellite tv for pc receiver.
The three-chip digital modem for Scientific Atlanta received Broadcom into the cable TV enterprise. The Ethernet chip for Intel received the corporate into the LAN enterprise. These are the corporate’s largest markets at present. Later, associated contracts drove the corporate into new markets. For instance, one for DSL transceivers based mostly on Broadcom’s QAM cable modem structure, designed for Nortel Networks, of Brampton, Ont., Canada, was Broadcom’s entry into the DSL chip market. One other enterprise, a improvement partnership with Sony Corp., Tokyo, subsequently introduced the corporate into the HDTV receiver IC enterprise.
However Broadcom didn’t prohibit itself to dealing with improvement contracts alone for lengthy. The modem chips it had developed for Scientific Atlanta introduced different clients knocking on its door. So in 1994, the then 15-person firm (14 engineers and an workplace supervisor) added a vice chairman of selling and put collectively its first product line, quickly establishing itself because the chief within the cable modem chip business.
On the time, cable modems have been rising as a broadband Web entry platform for the house market. Their downstream speeds, which at present are a number of megabits per second, supply the quickest Web entry in contrast with 56-kb/s modems and DSL hyperlinks. Upstream speeds, although slower, are additionally sooner than opponents. Cable operators can even present typical phone service over the modems as properly.
“We need to be the Intel of communications.”—Henry Samueli in 1994
Essential to Broadcom’s chip designs was the necessity to kind out the alerts being despatched to subscribers from the cable operator’s headend. In contrast to the devoted traces within the point-to-point hyperlinks utilized by telephone modems, cable modems share a line to the headend in a point-to-multipoint configuration. A steady bit stream is broadcast to all subscribers, with every assigned a novel deal with. Time-division a number of entry (TDMA) is used to allocate the only deal with to which it’s despatched. The upstream makes use of a TDMA protocol whereby customers ship requests to transmit information to the headend and are then assigned particular time slots by which to ship the info briefly bursts.
The problem of a single-chip cable modem design, based on Samueli, is dealing with its excessive diploma of complexity. The system incorporates a high-speed receiver and transmitter, each with precision analog entrance ends, in addition to a fancy media entry management protocol engine. Profitable execution requires a staff with a broad vary of experience, together with algorithm and protocol specialists, DSP architects, application-specific IC (ASIC) engineers, and full customized and mixed-signal circuit designers.
Broadcom additionally grew to become instrumental in writing the DOCSIS (Knowledge-Over-Cable Service Interface Specification) customary for cable modems, cooperating with Basic Instrument and LANcity, beneath the auspices of Cable Tv Laboratories (CableLabs), the cable business’s analysis arm in Louisville, Colo.
Permitted in 1998, DOCSIS is now the business customary for all cable modems being constructed for the U.S. market, and was just lately adopted by the International Telecommunication Union as a world cable modem customary. This market is poised for speedy progress as cable modems change into available by pc retailers so clients can simply plug them right into a cable line, slightly than hire the gadgets from their cable service suppliers. Knowledge may be transmitted at a charge of 43 Mb/s downstream and 10 Mb/s upstream utilizing TDMA.
Regardless that Broadcom was being run with a small workers, Nicholas and Samueli have been considering massive pretty early on. Steve Tsubota, now director of Broadcom’s cable TV enterprise unit, interviewed for a job with Samueli in 1994. All through the dialogue, he recalled, Samueli was low key and modest. Then Tsubota requested him the place he noticed Broadcom going sooner or later. Samueli, along with his 20-person firm crammed into workplaces shared with a legislation agency, answered, “We need to be the Intel of communications.”
Managing millionaires
4 years later, on 17 April 1998, the then 350-employee firm went public, making almost two-thirds of its staff paper millionaires. (As a result of Samueli and Nicholas didn’t search enterprise capital funding for Broadcom, they have been every in a position to retain over 20 % of the corporate for themselves and nonetheless be beneficiant with inventory choices.)
Broadcom’s inventory value has appreciated by greater than an element of 10 since its preliminary public providing. Samueli is now a billionaire thrice over, working an R&D group with some 400 engineers, greater than 50 of whom are Ph.D.s. The corporate as an entire now has about 700 staff, and Samueli oversees Broadcom’s analysis laboratories in Irvine, San Jose, and San Diego, Calif.; Atlanta, Ga.; Phoenix, Ariz.; the Netherlands; Singapore; and Bangalore, India.
Samueli claims he isn’t a start-up junkie; Broadcom will most likely be his final start-up enterprise: “I can’t see myself going by that punishment once more. So many components of success are out of your management. I don’t imagine I may create one other Broadcom once more, so I wouldn’t even need to attempt.”
“I don’t assume my household would put up with it, both,” he added. “Eighty-hour workweeks are very demanding on household life. I feel I’ve essentially the most understanding and tolerant spouse on the earth. There isn’t something I wouldn’t do for her, given all that she has completed for me, and her No. 1 request is for me to spend extra time at house.”
The cash hasn’t modified him a lot, colleagues say. His one splurge was to purchase a home on the ocean (his spouse’s life-long dream). He has additionally enormously elevated his philanthropy, with a give attention to college analysis and on science and math schooling for college kids from kindergarten by twelfth grade.
“Schooling is the important thing to prosperity,” Samueli mentioned. “I hope that by investing again into our instructional infrastructure, I can plant the seeds for the subsequent Broadcom.”
He nonetheless behaves like a university professor. “I’ve by no means given up my professor’s hat,” he informed Spectrum. “I really like to offer lectures, I really like to speak to folks and educate them issues.” He brags in regards to the technical successes of the engineers on his workers and of the papers they introduced at current conferences.
Not an instructional alone
However, though UCLA nonetheless lists Samueli as a school member on a depart of absence, he isn’t positive that he’ll ever return to academia.
“Life in business is just too thrilling,” he mentioned. “At a college, you might be on a treadmill. You usher in a graduate pupil, give him a analysis challenge, he spends three or 4 or 5 years on it, then he graduates. All that information he gathered leaves with him, and also you get a contemporary pupil who has to return up the educational curve from the underside. You spend plenty of time repeating your self. There may be some institutional reminiscence, however each time you’ve gotten considered one of your college students graduate, you lose quite a bit, although business and society acquire from the expertise you’ve gotten created.
“Alternatively, at our firm, folks don’t depart. They’ll in principle, however in our eight-year historical past, we’ve solely misplaced 4 engineers out of greater than 400. So you aren’t going by a reset each few years. You’re on a steady ramp of data accumulation, and that could be a big profit. You even have much more sources at your disposal: software program, computer systems, chip fabrication.”
One more profit, Samueli informed Spectrum, “is the give attention to actual merchandise. This creates good limits. You don’t do one thing until there’s a actual software for it. You get closure, completion, and success, and that’s rewarding in and of itself.
“The success of Broadcom has introduced me huge happiness in lots of respects; essentially the most thrilling to me is the power to create such intensive success and happiness for therefore many individuals. On the college, I used to be profitable, but it surely was on a a lot smaller scale. Right here, some 400 engineers have change into very profitable, financially in addition to professionally.”
Alexopoulos, of the College of California at Irvine, confirms that, whereas at coronary heart Samueli is an instructional, “he’s additionally a doer. He needs to see that his work has important and world affect, not solely in offering expertise for bettering society, but in addition in creating significant and difficult employment for engineers and nonengineers alike.”
Though a lot of Samueli’s success got here from his impartial technical achievements, as a supervisor, he’s a folks particular person. Noticed at a current assembly of his laboratory heads and different key workers members, Samueli sat quietly when technical issues have been mentioned, however rapidly jumped in throughout discussions about new hires, potential engineering recruits, and different human sources points. He was somewhat stunned when this was identified to him, then mentioned: “I feel recruiting is of paramount significance to the success of most high-tech corporations. I’ve confidence that technical points may be solved by the proficient folks now we have on the firm, however as a consequence of my networking within the analysis group, one of my key roles is in figuring out the perfect folks.”
The ‘nucleus of the black gap’
What typically attracts folks to the corporate are Samueli’s technical credentials and status for sharing the credit score. Stated Broadcom’s Tsubota: “He’s the nucleus of the black gap—an irresistible drive,” attracting expertise to Broadcom out of professorships, safe jobs, and company fellow positions.
And he has a great reminiscence for folks’s strengths and weaknesses. Anne Cole, at present’s cable enterprise unit controller and engineering controller who was Broadcom’s second worker, informed Spectrum that when she interviewed at Broadcom, a number of years after taking an introductory engineering class from Samueli, he stunned her by confronting her together with her tutorial report. “You turned in all of your homework and also you blew the ultimate,” he informed her. He ended up hiring her as an workplace supervisor (she had since earned an MBA), not an engineer.
He additionally sees serving to his workers logistically as a key position, and, in that, he will be the engineer’s dream boss. On the beforehand talked about assembly, the corporate’s info methods director introduced an issue: Engineers have been going through typically intensive delays in working computing jobs on the corporate’s giant servers—partially as a result of different engineers have been utilizing those self same servers to run easy duties that could possibly be simply run from a desktop workstation. Eliminating the delays would require adjustments in pc utilization or the acquisition of US $650,000 value of further servers.
One other supervisor may need responded by creating an official coverage itemizing what jobs may and couldn’t be run on the corporate’s shared servers, burdening his engineers with forms. Samueli barely hesitated. “From an engineering perspective,” he mentioned, “purchase the machines.”
However maybe his most necessary attribute as a supervisor is his niceness. Folks at Broadcom typically work till two within the morning. Samueli says it’s as a result of they’re aggressive and need their merchandise to win available in the market place. However one other motive appears to return into play. The Broadcom staff appear to need to make Samueli comfortable. Apart from being the technical heart of the corporate, Samueli is considered because the ethical heart, Tsubota mentioned.
“The engineers right here don’t need to disappoint him,” controller Cole informed Spectrum. “They need to meet his expectations—and he has very excessive expectations.” Stated one worker, “While you don’t come by for Henry [Samueli], it hurts much more than when Nick [CEO Nicholas] yells at you.”
This text appeared within the September 1999 print difficulty.
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