- published: 11 Dec 2014
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Broadcom Corporation is a fabless semiconductor company in the wireless and broadband communication business. The company is headquartered in Irvine, California, USA. Broadcom was founded by a professor-student pair Henry Samueli and Henry T. Nicholas III from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) at Los Angeles, California in 1991. In 1995, the company moved from its Westwood, California, office to Irvine, California. In 1998, Broadcom became a public company on the NASDAQ exchange (ticker symbol: BRCM) and now employs approximately 10,000 people worldwide in more than 15 countries.
Broadcom is among Gartner's Top 10 Semiconductor Vendors by revenue. In 2011, Broadcom's total revenue was $7.39 billion. In 2011, Broadcom was No. 343 on the Fortune 500, climbing 117 places from its 2010 ranking of No. 460. Broadcom first landed on the Fortune 500 in 2009. The Broadcom logo is inspired from the Mathematical Sinc function .
Broadcom's product line spans computer and telecommunication networking: the company has products for enterprise/metropolitan high-speed networks, as well as products for SOHO (small-office, home-office) networks. Products include transceiver and processor ICs for Ethernet and wireless LANs, cable modems, digital subscriber line (DSL), servers, home networking devices (router, switches, port-concentrators) and cellular phones (GSM/GPRS/EDGE/W-CDMA). It is also known for a series of high-speed encryption co-processors, offloading this processor-intensive work to a dedicated chip, thus greatly speeding up tasks that utilize encryption. This has many practical benefits for e-commerce, and PGP or GPG secure communications.