Editor’s Notice: Henry Samueli is the 2025 recipient of the IEEE Medal of Honor. IEEE Spectrum revealed this profile of Samueli within the September 1999 subject.
With the latest explosion within the reputation of cable and digital subscriber-line modems for high-speed Web entry, the percentages are that you’ll quickly have one in every of these broadband communications units in your house or workplace—in the event you don’t already. In the event you do, the percentages are that the chips contained in the modem could have been designed by Broadcom Corp., and be primarily based 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. scholar Henry Nicholas to discovered Broadcom, now in Irvine, Calif. Their first challenge was to design the world’s first chips for digital interactive tv.
At present Samueli holds patents for DSP-based receiver architectures for plenty of digital communications transceivers, together with ones for cable tv, satellite tv for pc tv, Ethernet, and high-bit-rate digital subscriber line providers. Plus Broadcom now makes greater than 95 % of the chips that go into U.S. digital cable set-top packing containers and cable modems. Such modems are considered as the muse for the way forward for information, voice, and video providers to the house.
Broadcom additionally has huge 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 immediately’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. Throughout the time period, every scholar was anticipated to construct a crystal radio from a equipment, utilizing a single crystal and an antenna wound on a bathroom paper tube. Uninterested in the prospect, Samueli requested his trainer if, as an alternative, he might 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 stated no—the short-wave radio was a ninth grade challenge—however Samueli endured and finally prevailed. It wasn’t simple, though it was a cookbook challenge. Samueli had by no means finished 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 stated. “He stated no one 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 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 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 might dwell 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, had been dedicated to supporting his training however couldn’t afford to ship him away to high school.) After he acquired his grasp’s diploma at UCLA, he went straight via 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 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 faculties went into protection. Hughes and TRW had been the highest two—you nearly didn’t contemplate every other firm.”
At TRW, Samueli was initially assigned to a communications techniques 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 growing circuit boards for army satellite tv for pc and radio communications techniques.
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 functions of DSP expertise to a satellite tv for pc communications system.
“Since in these days every chip contained only a few capabilities (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 affordable system,” Samueli stated. “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 discovered later,” he stated, “that my boss didn’t suppose I might do it. He had given me the project as a check, considering that I’d 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 annoyed when one thing goes fallacious as a result of I don’t wish to yell at folks.”—Henry Samueli
After that, he was given his decide 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 had 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 had 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 expertise earlier than the remainder of the world had considered doing such a factor. We didn’t have to try this a part of it digitally, however he pushed it—he insisted we might do it, and bought us all inventing algorithms to take action.”
The lure of academia
Since becoming a member of TRW in 1980, Samueli had been concurrently educating faculty 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 probability. “Not that I didn’t like TRW. To at the present time I believe it was probably the greatest jobs I might have had. Working within the protection business, you’re given all the cash and assets you want so as to develop the best, state-of-the-art expertise. However the alternative to be a professor at one of many high universities on this planet was too good to cross up.”
The very best a part of academia, Samueli thinks, is working with college students. “They’re so energetic and hardworking and motivated to study,” he stated. “It’s a thrilling surroundings.”
“Coming from a Jewish household,” he mused, “the large push was to develop into a medical physician. However working in a hospital round sick folks all day versus working at a college the place you have got all these vivid keen younger minds—there’s simply no comparability.”
The opposite bonus of the college surroundings is educational freedom. “You decide a topic and go for it. It’s important to elevate the cash, however no one 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 stated, “and Henry will need to 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 expertise to high-speed digital communications, constructing on the digital modem challenge he had accomplished at TRW. The primary Ph.D. scholar to affix 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 techniques structure background, and he grew to become a associate 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 Photographs
Nicholas complemented Samueli in one other approach, 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 delicate, very nice. In a aggressive surroundings he will 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 persona. “I’m Mr. Good Man,” he instructed Spectrum. “I’m not confrontational. So I get very annoyed when one thing goes fallacious as a result of I don’t wish to yell at folks.”
“Nick, alternatively,” he stated, “is rarely 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 bought a telephone name from two of his former TRW co-workers.
They had 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 had been commonplace on the time. However the firm then made a technological leap by growing 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 trouble to recruit Samueli. “We would have liked somebody who might give us credibility in a theoretical space,” Itri stated. “What we had been proposing had adaptive digital filters, and Henry had finished lots 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 depart UCLA, so he signed on as a one-day-a-week PairGain advisor. 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 packing containers that permit the set up of high-speed digital connections between companies and their native telephone corporations.
“I bought inventory choices to affix PairGain,” Samueli stated. “I had no concept 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 value a number of million {dollars}.
How Broadcom bought its begin
In the meantime, Samueli’s analysis group at UCLA was designing all types 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 finished digitally. Subsequent he proposed growing ICs for an all-digital modem that might 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 lots of corporations had been considering making use of this work to actual merchandise.
“Folks had been calling us up and saying, ‘That was a extremely attention-grabbing chip design you revealed. Have you ever thought of commercializing it?’ ” Samueli stated. In 1991 he determined to attempt. He and Nicholas included Broadcom, arrange the corporate in Nicholas’s spare bed room, and signed growth contracts with Scientific Atlanta, Intel, TRW, and the U.S. Air Power. Samueli saved 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 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 making ready to deploy an formidable check of interactive digital tv providers in Orlando, Fla., and Scientific Atlanta had contracted with the corporate to construct the world’s first digital cable set-top field. (Present cable set-top packing containers had 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 crammed many circuit boards. Samueli bought 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 subject 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 one talked about interactive TV for a number of years. Solely now’s the ubiquity of the World Vast Internet making interactive TV a marketable product.
Looking back, the Time Warner check seems to have been about 5 years too early. At present, Web TV merchandise that merge TV viewing with Internet entry carry out lots of the capabilities 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. (Obtainable Ethernet chips on the time had a high pace of 10 Mb/s.) The chip, which shipped in 1995, grew to become the primary DSP-based transceiver for LANs. The corporate lately introduced a 1-Gb/s Ethernet chip primarily based on related DSP expertise.
For TRW, Broadcom designed a digital frequency synthesizer chip for a army satellite tv for pc software. Beneath the Air Power contract, Broadcom’s employees developed an anti-jam filter chip for a International Positioning System satellite tv for pc receiver.
The three-chip digital modem for Scientific Atlanta bought Broadcom into the cable TV enterprise. The Ethernet chip for Intel bought the corporate into the LAN enterprise. These are the corporate’s largest markets immediately. Later, associated contracts drove the corporate into new markets. For instance, one for DSL transceivers primarily based 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 had been rising as a broadband Web entry platform for the house market. Their downstream speeds, which immediately 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 may also present typical phone service over the modems as properly.
“We wish to be the Intel of communications.”—Henry Samueli in 1994
Essential to Broadcom’s chip designs was the necessity to kind out the indicators 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 singular handle. Time-division a number of entry (TDMA) is used to allocate the only handle 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 during which to ship the information in brief bursts.
The problem of a single-chip cable modem design, in response to Samueli, is dealing with its excessive diploma of complexity. The machine 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 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 (Knowledge-Over-Cable Service Interface Specification) commonplace 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 commonplace for all cable modems being constructed for the U.S. market, and was lately adopted by the Worldwide Telecommunication Union as a world cable modem commonplace. This market is poised for fast progress as cable modems develop into available via laptop retailers so prospects can simply plug them right into a cable line, somewhat than lease the units from their cable service suppliers. Knowledge will be transmitted at a fee of 43 Mb/s downstream and 10 Mb/s upstream utilizing TDMA.
Regardless that Broadcom was being run with a small employees, Nicholas and Samueli had been considering huge 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 wish 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 had been every capable of 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 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 via that punishment another time. So many components of success are out of your management. I don’t imagine I might create one other Broadcom once more, so I wouldn’t even wish to attempt.”
“I don’t suppose my household would put up with it, both,” he added. “Eighty-hour workweeks are very anxious on household life. I believe I’ve probably the most understanding and tolerant spouse on this planet. There isn’t something I wouldn’t do for her, given all that she has finished for me, and her No. 1 request is for me to spend extra time at dwelling.”
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 concentrate on college analysis and on science and math training for college kids from kindergarten via twelfth grade.
“Training is the important thing to prosperity,” Samueli stated. “I hope that by investing again into our academic 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 instructed Spectrum. “I like to offer lectures, I 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 introduced at latest conferences.
Not a tutorial alone
However, though UCLA nonetheless lists Samueli as a school 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 stated. “At a college, you’re on a treadmill. You herald a graduate scholar, give him a analysis challenge, he spends three or 4 or 5 years on it, then he graduates. All that data he gathered leaves with him, and also you get a recent scholar who has to come back up the educational curve from the underside. You spend lots of time repeating your self. There may be some institutional reminiscence, however each time you have got one in every of your college students graduate, you lose so much, though business and society achieve from the expertise you have got created.
“However, at our firm, folks don’t go away. They will in concept, however in our eight-year historical past, we’ve solely misplaced 4 engineers out of greater than 400. So you aren’t going via a reset each few years. You’re on a steady ramp of information accumulation, and that could be a enormous profit. You even have much more assets at your disposal: software program, computer systems, chip fabrication.”
Yet one more profit, Samueli instructed Spectrum, “is the concentrate on 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; probably 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 develop into very profitable, financially in addition to professionally.”
Alexopoulos, of the College of California at Irvine, confirms that, whereas at coronary heart Samueli is a tutorial, “he’s additionally a doer. He desires to see that his work has important and world impression, 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 individual. Noticed at a latest assembly of his laboratory heads and different key employees members, Samueli sat quietly when technical issues had been mentioned, however shortly jumped in throughout discussions about new hires, potential engineering recruits, and different human assets points. He was somewhat shocked when this was identified to him, then stated: “I believe recruiting is of paramount significance to the success of most high-tech corporations. I’ve confidence that technical points will be solved by the gifted folks we’ve got on the firm, however as a result 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 usually attracts folks to the corporate are Samueli’s technical credentials and status for sharing the credit score. Mentioned 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, immediately’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 shocked 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 will be the engineer’s dream boss. On the beforehand talked about assembly, the corporate’s info techniques director introduced an issue: Engineers had been going through generally in depth delays in working computing jobs on the corporate’s massive servers—partly as a result of different engineers had been utilizing those self same servers to run easy duties that might be simply run from a desktop workstation. Eliminating the delays would require modifications in laptop utilization or the acquisition of US $650,000 value of extra servers.
One other supervisor may need responded by creating an official coverage itemizing what jobs might and couldn’t be run on the corporate’s shared servers, burdening his engineers with paperwork. Samueli barely hesitated. “From an engineering perspective,” he stated, “purchase the machines.”
However maybe his most essential attribute as a supervisor is his niceness. Folks at Broadcom usually work till two within the morning. Samueli says it’s as a result of they’re aggressive and wish their merchandise to win available in the market place. However one other motive appears to come back into play. The Broadcom workers appear to wish to make Samueli blissful. Apart from being the technical heart of the corporate, Samueli is considered because the ethical heart, Tsubota stated.
“The engineers right here don’t wish to disappoint him,” controller Cole instructed Spectrum. “They wish to meet his expectations—and he has very excessive expectations.” Mentioned one worker, “Once you don’t come via for Henry [Samueli], it hurts much more than when Nick [CEO Nicholas] yells at you.”
This text appeared within the September 1999 print subject.
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