Editor’s Observe: Henry Samueli is the 2025 recipient of the IEEE Medal of Honor. IEEE Spectrum printed this profile of Samueli within the September 1999 situation.
With the latest explosion within the recognition of cable and digital subscriber-line modems for high-speed Web entry, the percentages are that you’ll quickly have one among these broadband communications gadgets in your house or workplace—for those who don’t already. If you happen to do, the percentages are that the chips contained in the modem can 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 cutting-edge of digital broadband communications for greater than a decade, joined together 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.
At this time 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 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 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 one among 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. 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 bathroom paper tube. Uninterested in the prospect, Samueli requested his instructor 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 instructor stated no—the short-wave radio was a ninth grade challenge—however Samueli endured and ultimately prevailed. It wasn’t straightforward, though it was a cookbook challenge. Samueli had by no means performed something prefer it, and he remembers 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 challenge had fascinated him. Although he had managed to place it collectively, he had no concept 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 faculty, a Ph.D. thesis—a extremely theoretical paper entitled “Nonperiodic compelled overflow oscillations in digital filters”—and some years in trade earlier than he felt he had glad that purpose.
In pursuit of this understanding, Samueli utilized to UCLA, which had an excellent engineering division. It was additionally inexpensive as a result of he might reside together 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 training however couldn’t afford to ship him away to highschool.) 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 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 schools 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 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 purposes 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 really construct an inexpensive system,” Samueli stated. “It was overwhelmingly advanced, this pretty giant 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 informed me to sink or swim.”
“I came upon later,” he stated, “that my boss didn’t suppose I might do it. He had given me the task as a take a look at, pondering 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 flawed 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 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 remembers this challenge.
“We have been designing digital radios,” McAdam informed 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 likelihood. “Not that I didn’t like TRW. To at the present time I believe it was among the best jobs I might have had. Working within the protection trade, you might be given all the cash and sources you want to be able to develop the best, state-of-the-art expertise. However the alternative to be a professor at one of many prime universities on this planet 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 large push was to grow to be 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 tutorial freedom. “You choose a topic and go for it. You must 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 stated, “and Henry should have raised a number of million {dollars} in tools 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 programs 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 Photographs
Nicholas complemented Samueli in one other manner, because the partnership continued, with the later founding of Broadcom.
“The 2 are good cop/dangerous cop,” McAdam informed Spectrum. “Henry [Samueli] is admittedly delicate, very nice. In a aggressive surroundings he might 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 persona. “I’m Mr. Good Man,” he informed Spectrum. “I’m not confrontational. So I get very pissed off when one thing goes flawed as a result of I don’t prefer to yell at folks.”
“Nick, alternatively,” he stated, “isn’t shy about yelling. And also you want someone 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, together with his UCLA analysis program in full swing, pushing digital communications chips to larger and better speeds, Samueli bought 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, they usually wanted a chief architect. Their preliminary product operated at integrated-services digital community (ISDN) speeds (128 kb/s), which have been commonplace 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 bizarre telephone strains.
Ben Itri, now chief expertise officer of PairGain, was behind the trouble to recruit Samueli. “We wanted somebody who might give us credibility in a theoretical space,” Itri stated. “What we have been proposing had adaptive digital filters, and Henry had performed plenty of work in that space.” (Adaptive digital filters right 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 informed Spectrum. “After he was on board, we pitched the corporate to enterprise capitalists. They revered his background. With out him, it will 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 tools—the containers that permit the set up of high-speed digital connections between companies and their native telephone firms.
“I bought inventory choices to hitch 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 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 performed 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 printed his ends in over 100 papers and spoke at quite a few conferences, and plenty of firms have been considering making use of this work to actual merchandise.
“Individuals have been calling us up and saying, ‘That was a very fascinating chip design you printed. Have you ever thought-about 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 Drive. Samueli stored 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 might have had higher enterprise and negotiating abilities, turned Broadcom’s president and chief government 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 take a look at of interactive digital tv companies 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 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 containers for the Orlando area trial. Whereas the trial was a technical success, it was a advertising 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 Huge Net making interactive TV a marketable product.
Looking back, the Time Warner take a look at seems to have been about 5 years too early. At this time, Web TV merchandise that merge TV viewing with Net 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. (Accessible Ethernet chips on the time had a prime velocity of 10 Mb/s.) The chip, which shipped in 1995, turned the primary DSP-based transceiver for LANs. The corporate not too long ago introduced a 1-Gb/s Ethernet chip primarily based on related 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 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 clients knocking on its door. So in 1994, the then 15-person firm (14 engineers and an workplace supervisor) added a vp 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 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 quicker than rivals. Cable operators can even present typical phone service over the modems as effectively.
“We wish to be the Intel of communications.”—Henry Samueli in 1994
Essential to Broadcom’s chip designs was the necessity to type out the indicators being despatched to subscribers from the cable operator’s headend. Not like the devoted strains 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 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 in brief bursts.
The problem of a single-chip cable modem design, in line with 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 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 turned instrumental in writing the DOCSIS (Information-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 trade’s analysis arm in Louisville, Colo.
Authorised in 1998, DOCSIS is now the trade commonplace for all cable modems being constructed for the U.S. market, and was not too long ago adopted by the Worldwide Telecommunication Union as a global cable modem commonplace. This market is poised for speedy development as cable modems grow to be available via laptop retailers so clients can simply plug them right into a cable line, relatively than lease the gadgets from their cable service suppliers. Information might be transmitted at a price of 43 Mb/s downstream and 10 Mb/s upstream utilizing TDMA.
Despite the fact that Broadcom was being run with a small employees, Nicholas and Samueli have been pondering 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, together 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 in a position to retain over 20 p.c 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 3 times over, working an R&D group with some 400 engineers, greater than 50 of whom are Ph.D.s. The corporate as a complete 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 isn’t a start-up junkie; Broadcom will most likely be his final start-up enterprise: “I can’t see myself going via that punishment once more. So many components 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 attempt.”
“I don’t suppose my household would put up with it, both,” he added. “Eighty-hour workweeks are very tense on household life. I believe 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 performed 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 tremendously 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 following Broadcom.”
He nonetheless behaves like a school professor. “I’ve by no means given up my professor’s hat,” he informed Spectrum. “I like to present lectures, I like to speak to folks and educate them issues.” He brags concerning the technical successes of the engineers on his employees and of the papers they offered at latest conferences.
Not an educational alone
However, though UCLA nonetheless lists Samueli as a college member on a depart of absence, he isn’t certain that he’ll ever return to academia.
“Life in trade is just too thrilling,” he stated. “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 data he accrued leaves with him, and also you get a recent 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 have got one among your college students graduate, you lose so much, though trade and society acquire from the expertise you have got created.
“Alternatively, at our firm, folks don’t depart. 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 data accumulation, and that could be a large profit. You even have much more sources at your disposal: software program, computer systems, chip fabrication.”
One more profit, Samueli informed Spectrum, “is the concentrate on 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; essentially the most thrilling to me is the power to create such in depth 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 grow 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 desires to see that his work has important and world affect, 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 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 have been mentioned, however rapidly jumped in throughout discussions about new hires, potential engineering recruits, and different human sources 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 firms. I’ve confidence that technical points might be solved by the gifted folks we now have on the firm, however because 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 usually attracts folks to the corporate are Samueli’s technical credentials and repute 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 an excellent reminiscence for folks’s strengths and weaknesses. Anne Cole, immediately’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 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 employees logistically as a key function, and, in that, he stands out as the engineer’s dream boss. On the beforehand talked about assembly, the corporate’s data programs director offered an issue: Engineers have been going through generally in depth 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 might be simply run from a desktop workstation. Eliminating the delays would require adjustments in laptop utilization or the acquisition of US $650,000 value of further servers.
One other supervisor might 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 vital 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 need their merchandise to win out there place. However one other motive appears to return into play. The Broadcom workers appear to wish to make Samueli pleased. In addition to 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, “While 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 situation.
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