Editor’s Observe: 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 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 all these broadband communications units in your house or workplace—in case you don’t already. In the event you do, the chances are that the chips contained in the modem may 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. pupil Henry Nicholas to discovered Broadcom, now in Irvine, Calif. Their first undertaking was to design the world’s first chips for digital interactive tv.
At this time Samueli holds patents for DSP-based receiver architectures for 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 providers. 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 providers to the house.
Broadcom additionally has large 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 turning into one in all 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. Throughout 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 bathroom paper tube. Tired of the prospect, Samueli requested his instructor if, as a substitute, 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 instructor stated no—the short-wave radio was a ninth grade undertaking—however Samueli continued and finally prevailed. It wasn’t straightforward, though it was a cookbook undertaking. Samueli had by no means completed something prefer it, and he recollects slaving away on it each
evening all time period. Lastly, he introduced the assembled equipment to highschool, the instructor plugged it in, and it labored. “The instructor’s jaw hit the ground,” Samueli stated. “He stated no person will get it proper the primary time.” The instructor predicted that Samueli could be a profitable electrical engineer sometime. It was the primary time Samueli had heard of such a occupation.
The radio undertaking had fascinated him. Although he had managed to place it collectively, he had no thought the way it labored. “That turned my mission in life, from seventh grade onward, to learn the way radios work,” he informed IEEE Spectrum. It took him 9 years of school, a Ph.D. thesis—a extremely theoretical paper entitled “Nonperiodic pressured overflow oscillations in digital filters”—and some years in trade earlier than he felt he had happy that aim.
In pursuit of this understanding, Samueli utilized to UCLA, which had engineering division. It was additionally inexpensive as a result of he might reside along with his dad and mom. (His dad and mom, Holocaust survivors from Krakow, Poland, who operated a sequence 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 obtained 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 trade 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 trade 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 contemplate every other 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 navy satellite tv for pc and radio communications methods.
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 purposes of DSP expertise to a satellite 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 tons of or 1000’s of such digital logic chips to truly construct an inexpensive system,” Samueli stated. “It was overwhelmingly advanced, this pretty massive 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 stated, “that my boss didn’t assume I might do it. He had given me the task 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 individuals.”—Henry Samueli
After that, he was given his decide of any undertaking within the division. He selected a contract to design a high-speed digital radio modem for the U.S. Military—a undertaking 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 boundaries 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 undertaking.
“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 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 today I believe it was among the finest jobs I might have had. Working within the protection trade, you’re 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 cross up.”
The most effective 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 massive push was to turn into a medical physician. However working in a hospital round sick individuals all day versus working at a college the place you might have all these vivid keen younger minds—there’s simply no comparability.”
The opposite bonus of the college surroundings is tutorial freedom. “You decide a topic and go for it. It’s a must to 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 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 undertaking 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 turned a accomplice 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 manner, because the partnership continued, with the later founding of Broadcom.
“The 2 are good cop/unhealthy cop,” McAdam informed Spectrum. “Henry [Samueli] is de facto delicate, very nice. In a aggressive surroundings 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 best stability 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 individuals.”
“Nick, alternatively,” he stated, “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 greater and better speeds, Samueli bought 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 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 extraordinary cellphone traces.
Ben Itri, now chief expertise officer of PairGain, was behind the hassle to recruit Samueli. “We would have liked somebody who might give us credibility in a theoretical space,” Itri stated. “What we have been proposing had adaptive digital filters, and Henry had completed plenty of work in that space.” (Adaptive digital filters right 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 individuals 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 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 marketing consultant. 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 enable the set up of high-speed digital connections between companies and their native cellphone firms.
“I bought inventory choices to hitch PairGain,” Samueli stated. “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 turned value a number of million {dollars}.
How Broadcom bought 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 may function at a number of hundred megabits per second, which was far past current digital modem speeds. Samueli revealed his ends in over 100 papers and spoke at quite a few conferences, and lots of firms have been concerned with making use of this work to actual merchandise.
“Individuals 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 stated. In 1991 he determined to strive. 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 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 vice chairman of analysis and growth of Broadcom.” (Nicholas, who could have had higher enterprise and negotiating expertise, turned 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 bold check of interactive digital television 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 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 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 failure. Time Warner quietly pulled the plug on the undertaking, and no person talked about interactive TV for a number of years. Solely now’s the ubiquity of the World Wide Web making interactive TV a marketable product.
Looking back, the Time Warner check seems to have been about 5 years too early. At this time, Internet TV merchandise that merge TV viewing with Internet entry carry out most 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 strategies. (Out there Ethernet chips on the time had a prime pace of 10 Mb/s.) The chip, which shipped in 1995, turned the primary DSP-based transceiver for LANs. The corporate just lately introduced a 1-Gb/s Ethernet chip primarily based on comparable DSP expertise.
For TRW, Broadcom designed a digital frequency synthesizer chip for a navy satellite tv for pc utility. Below the Air Drive 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 at present. 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 limit itself to dealing with growth 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 trade.
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 quicker than opponents. Cable operators may 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 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 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 singular deal with. Time-division a number of entry (TDMA) is used to allocate the one deal with 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 through which to ship the information briefly bursts.
The problem of a single-chip cable modem design, based on 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 posh media entry management protocol engine. Profitable execution requires a crew 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 turned instrumental in writing the DOCSIS (Information-Over-Cable Service Interface Specification) customary for cable modems, cooperating with Normal Instrument and LANcity, underneath the auspices of Cable Tv Laboratories (CableLabs), the cable trade’s analysis arm in Louisville, Colo.
Authorised in 1998, DOCSIS is now the trade 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 fast development as cable modems turn into available via pc retailers so clients can simply plug them right into a cable line, somewhat than hire the units from their cable service suppliers. Information may 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 large 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 legislation 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 almost 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, operating 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 once more. So many elements of success are out of your management. I don’t consider I might create one other Broadcom once more, so I wouldn’t even wish to strive.”
“I don’t assume my household would put up with it, both,” he added. “Eighty-hour workweeks are very traumatic on household life. I believe I’ve probably 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 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 enormously elevated his philanthropy, with a deal with college analysis and on science and math training for college students from kindergarten via twelfth grade.
“Training is the important thing to prosperity,” Samueli stated. “I hope that by investing again into our instructional 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 informed Spectrum. “I really like to offer lectures, I really like to speak to individuals and train them issues.” He brags in regards to the technical successes of the engineers on his employees and of the papers they introduced at current conferences.
Not an educational alone
However, though UCLA nonetheless lists Samueli as a school member on a go away of absence, he’s not certain that he’ll ever return to academia.
“Life in trade is just too thrilling,” he stated. “At a college, you’re on a treadmill. You herald a graduate pupil, give him a analysis undertaking, 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 training curve from the underside. You spend plenty of time repeating your self. There may be some institutional reminiscence, however each time you might have one in all your college students graduate, you lose so much, though trade and society achieve from the expertise you might have created.
“Alternatively, at our firm, individuals don’t go away. They’ll 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 might be on a steady ramp of information accumulation, and that may be a enormous profit. You even have much more sources at your disposal: software program, computer systems, chip fabrication.”
Yet one more profit, Samueli informed Spectrum, “is the deal with actual merchandise. This creates good limits. You don’t do one thing except there’s a actual utility 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 power to create such intensive success and happiness for thus many individuals. On the college, I used to be profitable, nevertheless it was on a a lot smaller scale. Right here, some 400 engineers have turn 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 educational, “he’s additionally a doer. He needs to see that his work has vital and international impression, not solely in offering expertise for bettering society, but additionally in creating significant and difficult employment for engineers and nonengineers alike.”
Though a lot of Samueli’s success got here from his unbiased technical achievements, as a supervisor, he’s a individuals particular person. Noticed at a current assembly of his laboratory heads and different key employees members, Samueli sat quietly when technical issues have been mentioned, however shortly jumped in throughout discussions about new hires, potential engineering recruits, and different human sources points. He was just a little shocked when this was identified to him, then stated: “I believe recruiting is of paramount significance to the success of most high-tech firms. I’ve confidence that technical points may be solved by the proficient individuals we’ve got 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 individuals.”
The ‘nucleus of the black gap’
What usually attracts individuals to the corporate are Samueli’s technical credentials and popularity 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 reminiscence for individuals’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 shocked her by confronting her along with her tutorial document. “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 employees logistically as a key function, and, in that, he would be the engineer’s dream boss. On the beforehand talked about assembly, the corporate’s info methods director introduced an issue: Engineers have been dealing with generally intensive delays in operating 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 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 might and couldn’t be run on the corporate’s shared servers, burdening his engineers with forms. Samueli barely hesitated. “From an engineering perspective,” he stated, “purchase the machines.”
However maybe his most necessary attribute as a supervisor is his niceness. Individuals 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 return into play. The Broadcom workers appear to wish to make Samueli comfortable. Apart from being the technical middle of the corporate, Samueli is seen because the ethical middle, Tsubota stated.
“The engineers right here don’t wish to disappoint him,” controller Cole informed Spectrum. “They wish to meet his expectations—and he has very excessive expectations.” Mentioned one worker, “Whenever 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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