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 challenge.
With the latest explosion within the recognition of cable and digital subscriber-line modems for high-speed Web entry, the chances are that you’ll quickly have certainly one of these broadband communications units in your house or workplace—for those who don’t already. If you happen to 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 together with his Ph.D. scholar 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 variety 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 containers and cable modems. Such modems are seen as the muse for the way forward for knowledge, 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 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 certainly one of right now’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 scholar was anticipated to construct a crystal radio from a equipment, utilizing a single crystal and an antenna wound on a rest room paper tube. Tired of the prospect, Samueli requested his trainer 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 trainer mentioned no—the short-wave radio was a ninth grade undertaking—however Samueli continued and ultimately prevailed. It wasn’t straightforward, regardless that it was a cookbook undertaking. 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 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 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 concept the way it labored. “That turned my mission in life, from seventh grade onward, to learn the way radios work,” he advised 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 trade earlier than he felt he had happy that objective.
In pursuit of this understanding, Samueli utilized to UCLA, which had a very good engineering division. It was additionally reasonably priced as a result of he might stay together 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 schooling 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 provide 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 pal as a member of the technical workers at TRW, in Redondo Seaside, 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 virtually didn’t take into account every other firm.”
At TRW, Samueli was initially assigned to a communications programs 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 programs.
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 a whole lot or hundreds 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 advised me to sink or swim.”
“I discovered later,” he mentioned, “that my boss didn’t suppose I might do it. He had given me the project as a check, pondering that I’d 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 fallacious as a result of I don’t wish to yell at folks.”—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 ultimately 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 advised 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 acquired 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 supplied 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 best jobs I might have had. Working within the protection trade, you might be given all the cash and assets you want with a view 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 move 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 mentioned. “It’s a thrilling setting.”
“Coming from a Jewish household,” he mused, “the massive push was to turn into a medical physician. However working in a hospital round sick folks all day versus working at a college the place you could have all these shiny keen younger minds—there’s simply no comparability.”
The opposite bonus of the college setting is tutorial freedom. “You decide a topic and go for it. You need 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 will need to have raised a number of million {dollars} in tools 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. scholar 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 Photos
Nicholas complemented Samueli in one other method, because the partnership continued, with the later founding of Broadcom.
“The 2 are good cop/unhealthy cop,” McAdam advised Spectrum. “Henry [Samueli] is actually delicate, very nice. In a aggressive setting 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 advised Spectrum. “I’m not confrontational. So I get very pissed off when one thing goes fallacious as a result of I don’t wish to yell at folks.”
“Nick, then again,” he mentioned, “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 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 increased and better speeds, Samueli acquired 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 customary 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 odd telephone traces.
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 mentioned. “What we have been proposing had adaptive digital filters, and Henry had finished quite a lot of work in that space.” (Adaptive digital filters appropriate 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 gifted folks at UCLA,” Itri advised Spectrum. “After he was on board, we pitched the corporate to enterprise capitalists. They revered his background. With out him, it could 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 guide. 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 tools—the containers that permit the set up of high-speed digital connections between companies and their native telephone corporations.
“I acquired inventory choices to hitch PairGain,” Samueli mentioned. “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 acquired 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 current digital modem speeds. Samueli revealed his ends in over 100 papers and spoke at quite a few conferences, and lots of corporations have been concerned with making use of this work to actual merchandise.
“Folks have been calling us up and saying, ‘That was a very attention-grabbing chip design you revealed. Have you ever thought of commercializing it?’ ” Samueli mentioned. 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 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 vice chairman of analysis and growth of Broadcom.” (Nicholas, who could 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 state-of-the-art. New York Metropolis-based Time Warner was making ready to deploy an bold 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. (Current 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 crammed many circuit boards. Samueli acquired 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 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 could be the ubiquity of the World Broad Net making interactive TV a marketable product.
On reflection, the Time Warner check 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 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 army satellite tv for pc utility. Beneath the Air Drive contract, Broadcom’s workers developed an anti-jam filter chip for a International Positioning System satellite tv for pc receiver.
The three-chip digital modem for Scientific Atlanta acquired Broadcom into the cable TV enterprise. The Ethernet chip for Intel acquired the corporate into the LAN enterprise. These are the corporate’s largest markets right now. 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 vice chairman of promoting 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 right now are a number of megabits per second, provide 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 properly.
“We need 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 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 deal with. Time-division a number of entry (TDMA) is used to allocate the only 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 by which to ship the info briefly bursts.
The problem of a single-chip cable modem design, in keeping with Samueli, is dealing with its excessive diploma of complexity. The system 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 group 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 turned instrumental in writing the DOCSIS (Knowledge-Over-Cable Service Interface Specification) customary for cable modems, cooperating with Basic Instrument and LANcity, below the auspices of Cable Tv Laboratories (CableLabs), the cable trade’s analysis arm in Louisville, Colo.
Accepted 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 Worldwide 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 prospects can simply plug them right into a cable line, fairly than hire the units from their cable service suppliers. Knowledge may 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 workers, Nicholas and Samueli have been pondering 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, together with his 20-person firm crammed into places of work shared with a legislation 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 staff 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 % 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 3 times 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 staff, 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 yet again. So many elements of success are out of your management. I don’t imagine I might create one other Broadcom once more, so I wouldn’t even need to strive.”
“I don’t suppose my household would put up with it, both,” he added. “Eighty-hour workweeks are very worrying 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 finished 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 deal with college analysis and on science and math schooling for college students from kindergarten via 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 subsequent Broadcom.”
He nonetheless behaves like a school professor. “I’ve by no means given up my professor’s hat,” he advised Spectrum. “I really like to provide lectures, I really like to speak to folks and educate them issues.” He brags concerning the technical successes of the engineers on his workers and of the papers they introduced at latest conferences.
Not a tutorial alone
However, though UCLA nonetheless lists Samueli as a college member on a depart of absence, he’s not certain that he’ll ever return to academia.
“Life in trade is just too thrilling,” he mentioned. “At a college, you might be on a treadmill. You usher in a graduate scholar, give him a analysis undertaking, 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 contemporary scholar who has to come back up the educational curve from the underside. You spend quite a lot of time repeating your self. There’s some institutional reminiscence, however each time you could have certainly one of your college students graduate, you lose rather a lot, regardless that trade and society acquire from the expertise you could have created.
“Then again, at our firm, folks don’t depart. They will in principle, 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 big profit. You even have much more assets at your disposal: software program, computer systems, chip fabrication.”
One more profit, Samueli advised 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 flexibility 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 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 a tutorial, “he’s additionally a doer. He needs to see that his work has vital and world influence, 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 unbiased technical achievements, as a supervisor, he’s a folks individual. Noticed at a latest assembly of his laboratory heads and different key workers 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 assets points. He was somewhat shocked when this was identified to him, then mentioned: “I believe recruiting is of paramount significance to the success of most high-tech corporations. I’ve confidence that technical points may be solved by the gifted folks we’ve got on the firm, however on account 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 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 very good reminiscence for folks’s strengths and weaknesses. Anne Cole, right now’s cable enterprise unit controller and engineering controller who was Broadcom’s second worker, advised 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 together with her tutorial file. “You turned in all of your homework and also you blew the ultimate,” he advised 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 workers 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 introduced an issue: Engineers have been dealing with generally in depth 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 modifications 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 paperwork. Samueli barely hesitated. “From an engineering perspective,” he mentioned, “purchase the machines.”
However maybe his most vital 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 out there place. However one other motive appears to come back into play. The Broadcom staff appear to need to make Samueli completely happy. Apart from being the technical heart of the corporate, Samueli is seen because the ethical heart, Tsubota mentioned.
“The engineers right here don’t need to disappoint him,” controller Cole advised Spectrum. “They need 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 challenge.
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