Editor’s Word: Henry Samueli is the 2025 recipient of the IEEE Medal of Honor. IEEE Spectrum printed this profile of Samueli within the September 1999 concern.
With the latest explosion within the reputation of cable and digital subscriber-line modems for high-speed Internet access, the chances are that you’ll quickly have one among these broadband communications units in your house or workplace—should you don’t already. In case you do, the chances are that the chips contained in the modem may have been designed by Broadcom Corp., and be based mostly 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 mission was to design the world’s first chips for digital interactive tv.
Immediately Samueli holds patents for DSP-based receiver architectures for quite a few 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 inspiration for the way forward for knowledge, voice, and video providers 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 turning into one among right this moment’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. Uninterested in 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 mentioned no—the short-wave radio was a ninth grade mission—however Samueli continued and finally prevailed. It wasn’t simple, despite the fact that it was a cookbook mission. Samueli had by no means accomplished something prefer it, and he remembers slaving away on it each
evening all time period. Lastly, he introduced the assembled equipment to high school, the instructor plugged it in, and it labored. “The instructor’s jaw hit the ground,” Samueli mentioned. “He mentioned 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 mission 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 compelled 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 an excellent engineering division. It was additionally inexpensive 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 sequence of small companies in Los Angeles, had been dedicated to supporting his schooling 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 trade beckons
With the completion of his doctoral thesis, Samueli joined a good friend 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 had been the highest two—you nearly didn’t take into account 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 growing circuit boards for army 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 functions 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 a whole bunch or 1000’s of such digital logic chips to truly construct an inexpensive system,” Samueli mentioned. “It was overwhelmingly advanced, this pretty giant 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 mentioned, “that my boss didn’t assume I might do it. He had given me the task as a take a look at, pondering 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 mistaken as a result of I don’t prefer to yell at individuals.”—Henry Samueli
After that, he was given his choose of any mission within the division. He selected a contract to design a high-speed digital radio modem for the U.S. Military—a mission 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 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 remembers this mission.
“We had 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 received us all inventing algorithms to take action.”
The lure of academia
Since becoming a member of TRW in 1980, Samueli had been concurrently instructing 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 this present day I believe it was top-of-the-line jobs I might have had. Working within the protection trade, you might be given all the cash and assets 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 high universities on the earth was too good to move up.”
One of the best 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 atmosphere.”
“Coming from a Jewish household,” he mused, “the massive push was to change into a medical physician. However working in a hospital round sick individuals all day versus working at a college the place you’ve gotten all these shiny keen younger minds—there’s simply no comparability.”
The opposite bonus of the college atmosphere is educational freedom. “You choose a topic and go for it. You must 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 mentioned, “and Henry should have raised a number of million {dollars} in gear 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 mission 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 companion 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 method, because the partnership continued, with the later founding of Broadcom.
“The 2 are good cop/unhealthy cop,” McAdam informed Spectrum. “Henry [Samueli] is actually gentle, very nice. In a aggressive atmosphere 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 character. “I’m Mr. Good Man,” he informed Spectrum. “I’m not confrontational. So I get very annoyed when one thing goes mistaken as a result of I don’t prefer to yell at individuals.”
“Nick, then again,” he mentioned, “isn’t 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 greater and better speeds, Samueli received a cellphone 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 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 extraordinary cellphone strains.
Ben Itri, now chief expertise officer of PairGain, was behind the hassle to recruit Samueli. “We wanted somebody who might give us credibility in a theoretical space,” Itri mentioned. “What we had been proposing had adaptive digital filters, and Henry had accomplished 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 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 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 % 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 corporations.
“I received inventory choices to hitch PairGain,” Samueli mentioned. “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 received 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 accomplished 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 printed his ends in over 100 papers and spoke at quite a few conferences, and lots of corporations had been desirous about making use of this work to actual merchandise.
“Individuals had been calling us up and saying, ‘That was a extremely fascinating chip design you printed. 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 Power. 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 might have had higher enterprise and negotiating abilities, 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 cutting-edge. New York Metropolis-based Time Warner was making ready to deploy an bold take a look at 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 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 received 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 discipline trial. Whereas the trial was a technical success, it was a advertising and marketing failure. Time Warner quietly pulled the plug on the mission, and no person talked about interactive TV for a number of years. Solely now could be the ubiquity of the World Wide Web making interactive TV a marketable product.
On reflection, the Time Warner take a look at seems to have been about 5 years too early. Immediately, Internet TV merchandise that merge TV viewing with Net 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. (Accessible Ethernet chips on the time had a high pace of 10 Mb/s.) The chip, which shipped in 1995, turned the primary DSP-based transceiver for LANs. The corporate lately introduced a 1-Gb/s Ethernet chip based mostly on comparable DSP expertise.
For TRW, Broadcom designed a digital frequency synthesizer chip for a army satellite tv for pc utility. Underneath the Air Power contract, Broadcom’s workers developed an anti-jam filter chip for a World Positioning System satellite tv for pc receiver.
The three-chip digital modem for Scientific Atlanta received Broadcom into the cable TV enterprise. The Ethernet chip for Intel received the corporate into the LAN enterprise. These are the corporate’s largest markets right this moment. Later, associated contracts drove the corporate into new markets. For instance, one for DSL transceivers based mostly 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 prospects 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 had been rising as a broadband Web entry platform for the house market. Their downstream speeds, which right this moment 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 can even present standard 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 type out the alerts being despatched to subscribers from the cable operator’s headend. In contrast to the devoted strains 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 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 by which to ship the information briefly bursts.
The problem of a single-chip cable modem design, in keeping with 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 workforce 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, 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 lately adopted by the International Telecommunication Union as a world cable modem customary. This market is poised for fast development as cable modems change into available via pc retailers so prospects can simply plug them right into a cable line, slightly than hire the units from their cable service suppliers. Information might be transmitted at a price 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 had 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 staff paper millionaires. (As a result of Samueli and Nicholas didn’t search enterprise capital funding for Broadcom, they had been every in a position to 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, operating 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 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 most likely be his final start-up enterprise: “I can’t see myself going via that punishment yet again. 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 strive.”
“I don’t assume my household would put up with it, both,” he added. “Eighty-hour workweeks are very tense 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 accomplished 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 tremendously elevated his philanthropy, with a deal with college analysis and on science and math schooling for college kids from kindergarten via twelfth grade.
“Schooling 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 university 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 individuals and train them issues.” He brags in regards to 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 school 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 herald a graduate pupil, give him a analysis mission, he spends three or 4 or 5 years on it, then he graduates. All that data he collected leaves with him, and also you get a contemporary pupil who has to come back up the educational curve from the underside. You spend plenty of time repeating your self. There may be some institutional reminiscence, however each time you’ve gotten one among your college students graduate, you lose loads, despite the fact that trade and society acquire from the expertise you’ve gotten created.
“However, at our firm, individuals don’t depart. They’ll in idea, 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 could be a big profit. You even have much more assets at your disposal: software program, computer systems, chip fabrication.”
One more profit, Samueli informed Spectrum, “is the deal with actual merchandise. This creates good limits. You don’t do one thing until 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 monumental 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, but it surely was on a a lot smaller scale. Right here, some 400 engineers have change 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 important and world 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 individual. Noticed at a latest assembly of his laboratory heads and different key workers members, Samueli sat quietly when technical issues had been mentioned, however rapidly jumped in throughout discussions about new hires, potential engineering recruits, and different human assets points. He was slightly 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 might be solved by the gifted individuals we have now on the firm, however as a result of my networking within the analysis group, one of my key roles is in figuring out one of the best individuals.”
The ‘nucleus of the black gap’
What usually attracts individuals to the corporate are Samueli’s technical credentials and fame for sharing the credit score. Stated 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 individuals’s strengths and weaknesses. Anne Cole, right this moment’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 educational 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 workers logistically as a key function, and, in that, he will be the engineer’s dream boss. On the beforehand talked about assembly, the corporate’s data methods director introduced an issue: Engineers had been going through typically intensive delays in operating computing jobs on the corporate’s giant servers—partially as a result of different engineers had been utilizing those self same servers to run easy duties that may very well 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 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 forms. Samueli barely hesitated. “From an engineering perspective,” he mentioned, “purchase the machines.”
However maybe his most essential 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 available in the market place. However one other motive appears to come back into play. The Broadcom staff appear to wish to make Samueli pleased. Apart from being the technical heart of the corporate, Samueli is considered because the ethical heart, Tsubota mentioned.
“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.” Stated 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 concern.
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