In 1991, only a few folks had Internet access. Those that did publish in on-line boards or e-mail buddies from dwelling usually accessed the Internet by way of phone line, their messages touring at a prime pace of 14.4 kilobits per second. In the meantime, cable TV was rocketing in reputation. By 1991, sixty percent of U.S. households subscribed to a cable service; cable rollouts in the remainder of the world had been additionally choosing up pace.
Hypothetically, utilizing that rising cable community as a substitute of cellphone strains for Web entry would dramatically increase the pace of communications. And making cable TV itself digital as a substitute of analog would enable cable suppliers to hold many extra channels. The speculation of how to try this—utilizing analog-to-digital converters and digital signal processing to translate the analog waveforms that journey on coaxial cable into digital kind—was properly established. However the cable modems required to implement such a digital broadband community weren’t on the mass market.
Enter Henry Samueli. In 1985, he had established a multidisciplinary analysis program on the College of California, Los Angeles, to develop chips for digital broadband. Over the subsequent a number of years, he and his staff created all kinds of proof-of-concept chips demonstrating the important thing constructing blocks of high-performance digital modems. And in 1991, Samueli, alongside along with his UCLA grad scholar Henry Nicholas, based Broadcom Corp. to commercialize the expertise.
At this time, the improvements in digital signal processing architectures pioneered at UCLA and Broadcom persist within the digital modems that allow each wired and wireless communications in our units. For these advances, together with contributions to increasing science, expertise, engineering, and math (STEM) schooling, Samueli is the recipient of the 2025 IEEE Medal of Honor.
Henry Samueli
Present jobs:
Philanthropist, Chairman of Broadcom Inc.
Date of start:
20 September 1954
Birthplace:
Buffalo, N.Y.
Household:
Spouse, Susan; three kids; three grandchildren
Training:
BSEE 1975, MSEE 1976, Ph.D. 1980, all in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
First job:
Cashier and inventory boy in household’s liquor retailer
Greatest shock in profession:
The overwhelming success of Broadcom and the explosive development of the Web
Patents:
75
Favourite sort of music:
Basic rock, together with Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, Metallica, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones
Most up-to-date TV sequence watched:
“Lioness”
Favourite meals:
Chocolate
Favourite film:
The Godfather
Favourite nation:
Italy, for the folks, the tradition, the meals, the surroundings
Favourite cities:
Paris, London, New York, Tokyo
Leisure actions:
E-biking, snowboarding, mountain climbing, basketball
Pet peeves:
Disorganization and messes
Key organizational memberships:
IEEE, Marconi Society
Main awards:
IEEE Medal of Honor: “For pioneering analysis and commercialization of broadband communication and networking applied sciences, and promotion of STEM schooling,” IEEE Fellow, Marconi Fellow, member of the National Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Ellis Island Medal of Honor, Broadcom’s 2024 Emmy for “Pioneering Applied sciences Enabling Excessive-Efficiency Communications over Cable TV Techniques”
Earlier than the Cable Modem—Approach Earlier than
Samueli began down the trail that may result in cable modems when he was in center faculty. However he wasn’t enthusiastic about a future profession when he enrolled in an electrical store class. It was simply that, he says, “electrical energy appeared sort of mysterious, in contrast with metallic or wooden.”
The instructor assigned a crystal radio challenge, he remembers, “however wrapping a wire round a tube from rest room paper and connecting the wire to a crystal wasn’t that thrilling to me.” So he thumbed by way of an electronics catalog on the lookout for an alternate. A
Graymark five-tube radio caught his eye. It took some convincing earlier than the instructor agreed to let him sort out the challenge, which got here with difficult directions and concerned studying the way to solder.
“I labored each evening,” Samueli says. “There have been a whole bunch of connections that I needed to solder up. It took a full semester to construct it, and, on the finish, I introduced it into class, plugged it in, and sound got here out of it. I used to be completely blown away. And I actually made it my mission in life to determine how radios work.”
Samueli’s instructor was blown away as properly. And what he stated crystallized Samueli’s future. “He instructed me, ‘Henry, actually, I by no means ever thought you could possibly do that. However clearly, you’ve bought some particular presents. I believe it is best to pursue electrical engineering as a profession. You’re going to do one thing massive sometime.’ ”
UCLA Takes Maintain—and By no means Lets Go
Samueli ultimately utilized to UCLA—a college with a great electrical engineering program and reasonably priced tuition that was near dwelling. He went straight by way of to a Ph.D. however, he says, didn’t actually perceive how radios labored till just a few years past that.
After gathering his Ph.D. in 1980, Samueli joined TRW to work on protection communications initiatives. He says he liked each minute. “It’s an amazing alternative to be taught since you’re coping with superhigh tech, the best expertise on the time. And with a giant price range, you’ll be able to construct very refined issues,” he says.
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
Samueli didn’t utterly depart the world of upper schooling. In his spare time, he taught a circuit-design class at
California State University, Northridge, after which a number of circuits and sign processing courses at UCLA. In 1985, UCLA supplied him an assistant professorship, and he left TRW, taking coworker Henry Nicholas with him as his first Ph.D. scholar.
The 2 shaped the core of what would turn out to be the multidisciplinary communications analysis program in UCLA’s Built-in Circuits and Techniques Laboratory. They collaborated with a number of school members within the electrical engineering and laptop science division to develop digital modem chips.
“Chip design is a really complicated and broad self-discipline,” Samueli factors out. “There are analog designs, digital designs, a number of programs, varied architectures. Whereas such a multidisciplinary method is commonplace at this time, it was pretty uncommon on the time.”
AT&T Bell Labs was main the world in digital-communications analysis, Samueli remembers, utilizing low-speed modems that communicated in the identical bandwidths because the human voice. The labs constructed these modems utilizing programmable digital sign processing chips from
Texas Instruments and others.
“It was a software-driven method to constructing digital sign processing,” Samueli says. “And it solely ran at data rates of tens of kilobits per second. Our problem was the way to take these algorithms and make them run at tens of
megabits per second—one thousand instances quicker.”
Samueli and his colleagues concluded {that a} programmable structure utilizing software program was simply too sluggish. So that they started investigating parallel architectures that would implement refined algorithms on a single chip with no software program, simply devoted {hardware}. “That was our innovation. Again then, it was very novel,” he notes. “At this time, it’s what makes AI processors work.”
UCLA researchers who specialised in analog sign processing collaborated with the group to combine high-speed analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters into the core capabilities of the chip—“actually breakthrough work,” Samueli says.
“I used to be completely blown away. And I actually made it my mission in life to determine how radios work.”— Henry Samueli
Samueli and his staff weren’t pondering patents whereas they had been doing this analysis. As lecturers, their focus was on publishing their outcomes—some 100-plus papers over 10 years. However many others noticed business potential of their work.
“After we’d publish a paper, we’d go to a convention and make a presentation,” Samueli says. “Individuals would come as much as us after the speak and say, ‘That is actually neat stuff. Have you ever ever thought of commercializing it and beginning an organization?’”
Samueli and Nicholas took the leap in August of 1991, incorporating Broadcom Corp. and chipping in US $5,000 every to hire an workplace and purchase computer systems and workplace provides.
Samueli saved working full-time at UCLA whereas Broadcom started bringing in small protection contracts: creating a digital frequency synthesizer for TRW, a digital filter for a Rockwell microwave radio, and, for the U.S. Air Pressure, a digital filter to guard GPS indicators from jamming.
“These initiatives funded our R&D, and we gained increasingly information,” says Samueli. [For more on Samueli’s early career, see this 1999 profile.]
Scientific Atlanta Connects with Broadcom
In December 1992, a scholar of Samueli’s
gave a presentation at Globecom (the IEEE World Telecommunications Convention, that’s) a few prototype 10-plus megabit-per-second digital modem chip the group had developed.
“What was totally different of their chip is that it built-in digital and analog,” remembers Leo Montreuil, then an engineer at
Scientific Atlanta and now an IC design engineer at Broadcom. On the time, Scientific Atlanta shared the U.S. cable TV set-top field market with just one competitor, General Instrument. “We had many corporations making chips for Scientific Atlanta, however not that sort of chip.”
After the presentation, Montreuil approached the coed, who referred him to Samueli. Montreuil met with Samueli and Nicholas three months later.
Henry Samueli is donating the US $2 million from his IEEE Medal of Honor to help an annual student-leadership convention. Peter Adams
Scientific Atlanta wasn’t simply casually curious in regards to the work. The corporate had signed a serious contract with Time Warner to construct 4,000 set-top packing containers for the world’s first digital cable system, known as the
Full Service Network. It wanted a digital modem for that field, however the essential chips weren’t commercially obtainable.
“What they had been making an attempt to do in a single chip appeared so significantly better than multichip programs being developed by others,” says Montreuil. “Once you go from analog to a digital implementation, it’s important to fear about drift, temperature sensitivity, and different points. The extra you’ll be able to implement within the digital area, the extra predictable is the system.”
Scientific Atlanta awarded a $1 million growth contract to Broadcom in June of 1993. Though Broadcom’s design ended up utilizing three chips, the corporate did mix analog and digital circuitry on the identical silicon.
“The challenge was easy,” Samueli says, “as a result of it was primarily based on the prototype designs we had already carried out. And it labored the primary time, flawlessly.”
Time Warner’s digital cable community—activated in Orlando, Fla., in early 1995—was a technical success, however Time Warner didn’t take it any additional. The community wasn’t meant to be financially viable, Montreuil says, declaring that the core of every dwelling system was a prohibitively costly Solar SPARC workstation. “The aim was to accumulate information and to get our foot within the door for the subsequent era.”
Broadcom’s modem design impressed each Scientific Atlanta and Normal Instrument. The 2 rivals invested $1 million every, for a ten % whole stake within the startup. That funding allowed Broadcom to maintain engaged on digital modems, to scale back the fee by placing all of the capabilities on a single chip.
Sherman Chen was a senior engineer at Normal Instrument on the time. “We knew then that the Broadcom system would dramatically prolong the boundaries of communications,” remembers Chen, who’s now vp of engineering in Broadcom’s broadband video group. “Concepts like superior error correction and digital compression had been round, however they had been all simply elegant theories till Broadcom constructed the primary mixed-signal silicon for broadband communications. Broadcom created an business.”
Broadcom wasn’t the one firm chasing the low-cost digital modem grail. One key competitor was LANcity, which had a $500 digital modem. The market was evolving rapidly, and it was turning into clear to cable operators that this new expertise would require standardization. Broadcom, CableLabs, Normal Instrument, LANcity, 3Com, and others
began collaborating in 1995 to create a global commonplace known as the Data-Over-Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS).
“Individuals would come as much as us after the speak and say, ‘That is actually neat stuff. Have you ever ever thought of commercializing it and beginning an organization?’ ”— Henry Samueli
Round that point, Samueli left UCLA to give attention to Broadcom, which had lately moved from Los Angeles to Irvine, in Orange County. Reluctant to chop his educational ties, he requested that his departure be thought-about a short lived depart of absence. He formally stays on depart from UCLA even now.
In 1995, Broadcom launched its first mainstream business product—that’s, a tool constructed to promote on the open market, not developed underneath contract. The BCM3100 was an under-$20, single-chip, DOCSIS-compatible digital modem. In 1996, Broadcom added one other sort of product: digital Ethernet chips, what Samueli says was the world’s first all-digital implementation of Ethernet expertise. With these two profitable product strains, Broadcom went public in 1998 at a valuation of $1 billion, making Samueli, Nicholas, and plenty of of Broadcom’s 320 or so workers rich. By mid-2000, that valuation had jumped to greater than $60 billion, with Samueli’s stake value about $10 billion, and, in keeping with the
Orange County Register, the common worker value almost $6 million.
“We had been a really beneficiant firm to our workers,” Samueli says. “We gave inventory to just about everyone within the firm. We had it to present as a result of we didn’t dilute our shares by taking over venture capital traders.”
The SEC Goes After Broadcom’s Inventory Possibility Grants
This sharing of the wealth, satirically, led to one of many darkest chapters in Samueli’s story. Within the mid-2000s, the U.S. Securities and Alternate Fee started investigating the usage of inventory choices at plenty of tech corporations, together with Broadcom. The SEC opened a proper inquiry into Broadcom’s practices in late 2006 and in 2008 charged a number of Broadcom executives, together with Samueli and Nicholas, of backdating inventory choices.
“It was a nightmare,” Samueli says. “We went by way of 5 years of hell. It’s horrifying. They threaten you. They are saying, ‘We’re going to place you in jail for 300 years.’ ”
In late 2009, the case got here earlier than U.S. District Courtroom Decide
Cormac Carney. After listening to a number of the proof, together with testimony from Samueli and others, the choose “threw every little thing out,” Samueli says.
Carney appeared notably outraged by the prosecution’s remedy of Samueli.
His ruling stated: “The uncontroverted proof at trial established that Dr. Samueli was an excellent engineer and a person of unimaginable integrity. There was no proof at trial to counsel that Dr. Samueli did something incorrect, not to mention prison. But, the federal government launched into a marketing campaign of intimidation and different misconduct to embarrass him and produce him down.”
Says Samueli: “This entire choices backdating scandal was distress, however I wouldn’t change what we did. I believe being overly beneficiant to workers is an effective factor.”
In the meantime, Broadcom cofounder Nicholas was struggling. He had resigned from the corporate in 2003, and across the identical time because the inventory choices investigation, he was indicted for distribution of unlawful medicine. Nicholas entered rehab in 2008, and
the charges were eventually dropped. A decade later, although, Nicholas was arrested in Las Vegas for drug trafficking and took a plea deal with out admitting guilt.
“I haven’t spoken to him in a few years,” says Samueli. “It’s actually unhappy. However what he did for the corporate can’t be underestimated. I want him all the very best.”
Samueli’s Philanthropy and the Giving Pledge
Samueli remained a gradual presence as Broadcom’s chief expertise officer till 2018, persevering with by way of its acquisition by Avago in 2016. (The ensuing entity is now known as
Broadcom Inc.) Since 2018, he’s served as chairman. He nonetheless has a giant affect on the corporate’s engineers. Charlie Kawwas, president of Broadcom’s semiconductor options group, says that Samueli continues to attend the entire division’s technical evaluations—about 72 a yr, every lasting 2 to three hours.
“He engages with the engineers, asking questions and giving suggestions, and so they love that,” Kawwas says.
On a cruise to Antarctica in 2023, Henry Samueli “went to each lecture…he went on each tour,” a colleague remembers. Lindsey Spindle
Along with his present private wealth
estimated by Forbes at about $20 billion, Samueli spends a lot of his time giving money away by way of the Samueli Foundation. He additionally chairs the board of the Broadcom Foundation. He and his spouse, Susan, have dedicated to the Giving Pledge, promising to present away most of their wealth both throughout their lifetimes or of their wills.
“After Broadcom went public, and the inventory was flying, Susan and I made a decision we wanted to begin giving this away. It was simple to think about what I wished to present again to. What created this wealth? My engineering education. And UCLA was that complete schooling—my bachelor’s, grasp’s, Ph.D., school member. So there was no query in my thoughts that the primary main reward could be to
UCLA and the engineering school, and that was $30 million in 1999.” [See “Henry Samueli’s Career Advice for Aspiring Engineers.”]
Since then, the Samueli Basis has supported engineering and integrative well being applications at UCLA and the College of California, Irvine, for a complete, Samueli estimates, of greater than $500 million. (Integrative well being is well being care that embraces different therapies together with typical drugs and is a ardour of Samueli’s spouse.) The inspiration additionally targets initiatives geared toward bringing college students into the STEM pipeline, together with making a constitution center and highschool—
the Samueli Academy—centered on hands-on studying in engineering and design arts. It’s working with group faculties to broaden coaching for nursing, building, maritime, and STEM careers. And the muse funds initiatives to fight antisemitism and to advertise collaborations with Israel and initiatives inside Israel, a rising focus in response to latest occasions.
“He engages with the engineers, asking questions and giving suggestions, and so they love that.”— Charlie Kawwas, Broadcom
Altogether the muse has distributed greater than $1 billion to this point, and it’s on monitor to present away a few billion extra on this decade, reviews
Lindsey Spindle, president of the Samueli Household Philanthropies, which oversees the muse and the household’s different, smaller philanthropic efforts.
“Henry’s engineering background offers him the fitting structure for philanthropy,” Spindle says. “He is aware of about programs constructing. He appreciates interconnectivity. When you’re constructing {hardware}, it’s important to take into consideration the bigger system during which it is going to perform, be affected person, and be prepared to iterate. Once you care about combating antisemitism, ending homelessness, and reorienting drugs in the direction of well-being, you additionally must have a programs orientation and be prepared to iterate.”
This yr’s IEEE Medal of Honor comes with a major money award—
$2 million, up from $50,000 within the latest previous. Samueli, an IEEE since his scholar days and now an IEEE Fellow, plans to make use of the cash to create an endowment to allow IEEE’s Eta Kappa Nu honor society to host an annual student-leadership convention, one thing he’s been funding immediately for the previous three years.
Henry Samueli and his spouse, Susan, have fun the Stanley Cup victory for the Anaheim Geese hockey staff, which Samueli purchased in 2005. Harry How/Getty Photographs
Samueli can also be the proprietor of the Nationwide Hockey League franchise the
Anaheim Ducks. At a look, this would possibly look like a typical wealthy man’s plaything—and there’s no doubt that he enjoys his involvement with the staff. However the acquisition got here from an impulse to do good. In 2003, the corporate managing the Geese’ dwelling, the Anaheim Area, went bankrupt. Anaheim officers knew Samueli was an lively businessman within the Ocean County group, and so they requested him to take over administration of the sector (now known as the Honda Heart). In the meantime, Geese proprietor Disney was wanting to promote the staff.
Says Samueli: “In worry of an outsider coming in and shifting the staff out of city, we determined that, for the group’s sake, we’d ensure they keep right here—and discover ways to run a sports activities staff.”
“It was a giant studying curve,” he says. “However in any enterprise, it’s actually in regards to the administration. We put in a great administration staff—and gained the Stanley Cup in our second yr of possession.”
His dive into studying about hockey is attribute of Samueli’s method to only about every little thing, individuals who’ve labored with him report.
“Henry has a seemingly limitless capability to entertain new concepts,” Spindle says. She described a visit to Antarctica, for which her household joined a number of the Samuelis. “Henry went to each lecture supplied on the ship. He went on each tour,” she says. In his work with the muse, she continued, he’s equally curious and engaged. “He reveals up at each assembly,” she says. “You may ship him a 120-page doc, and he’ll learn each phrase and are available ready to ask questions.”
The hockey staff is a part of Samueli’s funding in, and pleasure of, the Orange County group. Subsequent up is creating a real downtown Anaheim, within the type of an arts and leisure district tagged
OCVIBE. And in his free time, he takes lengthy e-bike rides simply to benefit from the neighborhoods.
“OCVIBE and the Geese are an vital a part of our lives,” Samueli says. “And as Broadcom inventory grows, we simply maintain placing increasingly cash into the muse. That’s not going to cease. Then, in fact, there’s being on the Broadcom board and deeply concerned with Broadcom—I can see that persevering with for a few years. Theoretically, I’m retired, however I’m as busy as ever.”
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