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 concern.
With the current explosion within the recognition of cable and digital subscriber-line modems for high-speed Internet access, the chances are that you’ll quickly have one in every of these broadband communications gadgets in your house or workplace—for those who don’t already. When you do, the chances are that the chips contained in the modem can 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 state-of-the-art 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.
Right now Samueli holds patents for DSP-based receiver architectures for numerous 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 p.c of the chips that go into U.S. digital cable set-top packing containers and cable modems. Such modems are seen as the inspiration for the way forward for knowledge, 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 different 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 turning into one in every of at this time’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. In the course of 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 continued and ultimately prevailed. It wasn’t straightforward, although it was a cookbook challenge. Samueli had by no means accomplished something prefer it, and he remembers slaving away on it each
night time all time period. Lastly, he introduced the assembled equipment to highschool, 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 can be a profitable electrical engineer sometime. It was the primary time Samueli had heard of such a occupation.
The radio challenge had fascinated him. Although he had managed to place it collectively, he had no thought the way it labored. “That grew to become my mission in life, from seventh grade onward, to learn how radios work,” he instructed IEEE Spectrum. It took him 9 years of school, 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 aim.
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 dwell along with his dad and mom. (His dad and mom, Holocaust survivors from Krakow, Poland, who operated a collection of small companies in Los Angeles, have been dedicated to supporting his training however couldn’t afford to ship him away to highschool.) After he acquired his grasp’s diploma at UCLA, he went straight by means of 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 good friend as a member of the technical employees 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 schools went into protection. Hughes and TRW have been the highest two—you virtually didn’t contemplate another firm.”
At TRW, Samueli was initially assigned to a communications programs group that was analyzing the wartime survivability of U.S. communications networks. A yr later, he was moved right into a design group that was creating circuit boards for navy satellite tv for pc and radio communications programs.
His first task 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 functions of DSP know-how 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 1000’s of such digital logic chips to truly construct an inexpensive system,” Samueli mentioned. “It was overwhelmingly advanced, this pretty massive field of {hardware} with about 1200 logic chips and several 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 instructed 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 task as a check, considering that I might ultimately 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 mistaken 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 ultimately 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 know-how 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 know-how for TRW’s electronics and know-how division, was a number of administration layers above Samueli on the time, however he remembers this challenge.
“We have been designing digital radios,” McAdam instructed Spectrum,” and he was doing digital sign demodulators for them. He carried out them utilizing digital phase-lock-loop know-how 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 obtained us all inventing algorithms to take action.”
The lure of academia
Since becoming a member of TRW in 1980, Samueli had been concurrently instructing school engineering programs in his spare time—first at California State College, Northridge, after which at UCLA. In 1985 UCLA supplied him a full-time place.
Samueli jumped on the probability. “Not that I didn’t like TRW. To today I feel it was among the finest 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 know-how. However the alternative to be a professor at one of many high universities on this planet was too good to move up.”
One of the best a part of academia, Samueli thinks, is working with college students. “They’re so energetic and hardworking and motivated to study,” he mentioned. “It’s a thrilling surroundings.”
“Coming from a Jewish household,” he mused, “the large push was to turn out to be a medical physician. However working in a hospital round sick folks all day versus working at a college the place you’ve got all these shiny keen younger minds—there may be simply no comparability.”
The opposite bonus of the college surroundings is educational freedom. “You choose a topic and go for it. It’s a must to elevate 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 firms 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 know-how 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 programs 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 Pictures
Nicholas complemented Samueli in one other means, because the partnership continued, with the later founding of Broadcom.
“The 2 are good cop/unhealthy cop,” McAdam instructed Spectrum. “Henry [Samueli] is de facto gentle, very nice. In a aggressive surroundings he could 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 best stability to his laid-back character. “I’m Mr. Good Man,” he instructed Spectrum. “I’m not confrontational. So I get very pissed off when one thing goes mistaken as a result of I don’t prefer to yell at folks.”
“Nick, however,” he mentioned, “is rarely shy about yelling. And also you want anyone like that to run a profitable company. It has turned out to be an amazing 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 larger and better speeds, Samueli obtained a cellphone 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, they usually wanted a chief architect. Their preliminary product operated at integrated-services digital community (ISDN) speeds (128 kb/s), which have been normal 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 strange cellphone strains.
Ben Itri, now chief know-how officer of PairGain, was behind the trouble to recruit Samueli. “We wanted somebody who may give us credibility in a theoretical space,” Itri mentioned. “What we have been proposing had adaptive digital filters, and Henry had accomplished a variety of work in that space.” (Adaptive digital filters appropriate for the distortion that happens when a broadband digital sign is shipped over the phone community, which is optimized for analog voice communications.)
“He additionally gave us entry to a pool of gifted folks at UCLA,” Itri instructed Spectrum. “After he was on board, we pitched the corporate to enterprise capitalists. They revered his background. With out him, it might 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 advisor. He instantly introduced Nicholas on board, who added a PairGain put up 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 p.c market share for HDSL transmission gear—the packing containers that permit the set up of high-speed digital connections between companies and their native cellphone firms.
“I obtained inventory choices to hitch PairGain,” Samueli mentioned. “I had no thought what that meant on the time, however, boy, did I study fast.” PairGain went public in 1993, and Samueli’s inventory subsequently grew to become price a number of million {dollars}.
How Broadcom obtained 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 accomplished digitally. Subsequent he proposed creating ICs for an all-digital modem that may function at a number of hundred megabits per second, which was far past present digital modem speeds. Samueli revealed his leads to over 100 papers and spoke at quite a few conferences, and plenty of firms have been occupied with making use of this work to actual merchandise.
“Individuals have been calling us up and saying, ‘That was a extremely fascinating chip design you revealed. Have you ever thought of commercializing it?’ ” Samueli mentioned. In 1991 he determined to attempt. He and Nicholas integrated Broadcom, arrange the corporate in Nicholas’s spare bed room, and signed growth contracts with Scientific Atlanta, Intel, TRW, and the U.S. Air Drive. Samueli saved his UCLA put up 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 vp of analysis and growth of Broadcom.” (Nicholas, who could 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 state-of-the-art. New York Metropolis-based Time Warner was getting 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 packing 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 obtained a patent for the work on the all-digital cable receiver structure. Utilizing Broadcom’s design, Scientific Atlanta constructed 2,000 cable packing 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. Right now, Internet TV merchandise that merge TV viewing with Internet 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 high velocity of 10 Mb/s.) The chip, which shipped in 1995, grew to become the primary DSP-based transceiver for LANs. The corporate not too long ago introduced a 1-Gb/s Ethernet chip based mostly on related DSP know-how.
For TRW, Broadcom designed a digital frequency synthesizer chip for a navy satellite tv for pc software. Beneath the Air Drive contract, Broadcom’s employees developed an anti-jam filter chip for a World Positioning System satellite tv for pc receiver.
The three-chip digital modem for Scientific Atlanta obtained Broadcom into the cable TV enterprise. The Ethernet chip for Intel obtained the corporate into the LAN enterprise. These are the corporate’s largest markets at this time. 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 growth partnership with Sony Corp., Tokyo, subsequently introduced the corporate into the HDTV receiver IC enterprise.
However Broadcom didn’t prohibit itself to dealing with growth contracts alone for lengthy. The modem chips it had developed for Scientific Atlanta introduced different prospects knocking on its door. So in 1994, the then 15-person firm (14 engineers and an workplace supervisor) added a vp of promoting 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 this time 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 rivals. Cable operators also can present standard 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 strains within the point-to-point hyperlinks utilized by cellphone 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 tackle. Time-division a number of entry (TDMA) is used to allocate the only tackle to which it’s despatched. The upstream makes use of a TDMA protocol whereby customers ship requests to transmit knowledge to the headend and are then assigned particular time slots during 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 gadget incorporates a high-speed receiver and transmitter, each with precision analog entrance ends, in addition to a posh media entry management protocol engine. Profitable execution requires a crew with a broad vary of experience, together with algorithm and protocol consultants, 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 (Information-Over-Cable Service Interface Specification) normal for cable modems, cooperating with Normal Instrument and LANcity, beneath the auspices of Cable Tv Laboratories (CableLabs), the cable business’s analysis arm in Louisville, Colo.
Authorised in 1998, DOCSIS is now the business normal for all cable modems being constructed for the U.S. market, and was not too long ago adopted by the International Telecommunication Union as a global cable modem normal. This market is poised for speedy development as cable modems turn out to be available by means of laptop retailers so prospects can simply plug them right into a cable line, slightly than lease the gadgets from their cable service suppliers. Information could be transmitted at a fee of 43 Mb/s downstream and 10 Mb/s upstream utilizing TDMA.
Though Broadcom was being run with a small employees, 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 places of work shared with a regulation 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 practically two-thirds of its workers paper millionaires. (As a result of Samueli and Nicholas didn’t search enterprise capital funding for Broadcom, they have been every capable of retain over 20 p.c of the corporate for themselves and nonetheless be beneficiant with inventory choices.)
Broadcom’s inventory worth 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 workers, 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’s not a start-up junkie; Broadcom will in all probability be his final start-up enterprise: “I can’t see myself going by means of that punishment yet again. 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 worrying on household life. I feel I’ve essentially the most understanding and tolerant spouse on this planet. There isn’t something I wouldn’t do for her, given all that she has accomplished for me, and her No. 1 request is for me to spend extra time at residence.”
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 significantly elevated his philanthropy, with a deal with college analysis and on science and math training for college students from kindergarten by means of twelfth grade.
“Training is the important thing to prosperity,” Samueli mentioned. “I hope that by investing again into our academic infrastructure, I can plant the seeds for the following Broadcom.”
He nonetheless behaves like a university professor. “I’ve by no means given up my professor’s hat,” he instructed 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 employees and of the papers they offered at current conferences.
Not an educational alone
However, though UCLA nonetheless lists Samueli as a college member on a go away of absence, he’s not 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 herald 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 collected leaves with him, and also you get a recent pupil who has to return up the training curve from the underside. You spend a variety of time repeating your self. There’s some institutional reminiscence, however each time you’ve got one in every of your college students graduate, you lose loads, although business and society acquire from the expertise you’ve got created.
“Alternatively, at our firm, folks don’t go away. They will in idea, however in our eight-year historical past, we’ve solely misplaced 4 engineers out of greater than 400. So you aren’t going by means of 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.”
Yet one more profit, Samueli instructed Spectrum, “is the deal with 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 monumental happiness in lots of respects; essentially the most thrilling to me is the flexibility to create such in depth success and happiness for thus 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 turn out to be very profitable, financially in addition to professionally.”
Alexopoulos, of the College of California at Irvine, confirms that, whereas at coronary heart Samueli is an educational, “he’s additionally a doer. He needs to see that his work has important and world impression, not solely in offering know-how for enhancing 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 individual. Noticed at a current assembly of his laboratory heads and different key employees 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 firms. I’ve confidence that technical points could be solved by the gifted folks we’ve got on the firm, however because of my networking within the analysis neighborhood, one of my key roles is in figuring out the very best 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 pressure,” 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 this time’s cable enterprise unit controller and engineering controller who was Broadcom’s second worker, instructed 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 along with her educational file. “You turned in all of your homework and also you blew the ultimate,” he instructed 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 employees logistically as a key position, and, in that, he stands out as the engineer’s dream boss. On the beforehand talked about assembly, the corporate’s info programs director offered an issue: Engineers have been dealing with generally in depth delays in working computing jobs on the corporate’s massive servers—partly as a result of different engineers have been utilizing those self same servers to run easy duties that might be simply run from a desktop workstation. Eliminating the delays would require adjustments in laptop utilization or the acquisition of US $650,000 price of extra servers.
One other supervisor might 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 paperwork. Samueli barely hesitated. “From an engineering perspective,” he mentioned, “purchase the machines.”
However maybe his most necessary attribute as a supervisor is his niceness. Individuals at Broadcom typically work till two within the morning. Samueli says it’s as a result of they’re aggressive and wish their merchandise to win out there place. However one other motive appears to return into play. The Broadcom workers appear to need to make Samueli pleased. In addition to being the technical middle of the corporate, Samueli is seen because the ethical middle, Tsubota mentioned.
“The engineers right here don’t need to disappoint him,” controller Cole instructed Spectrum. “They need to meet his expectations—and he has very excessive expectations.” Stated one worker, “If you don’t come by means of for Henry [Samueli], it hurts much more than when Nick [CEO Nicholas] yells at you.”
This text appeared within the September 1999 print concern.
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