In 1991, only a few folks had Web entry. Those that did publish in on-line boards or electronic mail associates from house usually accessed the Web through phone line, their messages touring at a prime velocity of 14.4 kilobits per second. In the meantime, cable TV was rocketing in recognition. By 1991, sixty p.c of U.S. households subscribed to a cable service; cable rollouts in the remainder of the world have been additionally choosing up velocity.
Hypothetically, utilizing that rising cable community as a substitute of cellphone traces for Web entry would dramatically increase the velocity of communications. And making cable TV itself digital as a substitute of analog would permit cable suppliers to hold many extra channels. The speculation of how to try this—utilizing analog-to-digital converters and digital sign processing to translate the analog waveforms that journey on coaxial cable into digital type—was nicely 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 group created all kinds of proof-of-concept chips demonstrating the important thing constructing blocks of high-performance digital modems. And in 1991, Samueli, alongside together with his UCLA grad pupil Henry Nicholas, based Broadcom Corp. to commercialize the expertise.
Right this moment, the improvements in digital sign processing architectures pioneered at UCLA and Broadcom persist within the digital modems that allow each wired and wi-fi communications in our gadgets. For these advances, together with contributions to increasing science, expertise, engineering, and math (STEM) training, Samueli is the recipient of the 2025 IEEE Medal of Honor.
Henry Samueli
Present jobs:
Philanthropist, Chairman of Broadcom Inc.
Date of beginning:
20 September 1954
Birthplace:
Buffalo, N.Y.
Household:
Spouse, Susan; three kids; three grandchildren
Schooling:
BSEE 1975, MSEE 1976, Ph.D. 1980, all in electrical engineering from the College 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 progress of the Web
Patents:
75
Favourite form of music:
Traditional rock, together with Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, Metallica, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones
Most up-to-date TV collection 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, 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 training,” IEEE Fellow, Marconi Fellow, member of the Nationwide 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 Programs”
Earlier than the Cable Modem—Means Earlier than
Samueli began down the trail that may result in cable modems when he was in center college. However he wasn’t fascinated by a future profession when he enrolled in an electrical store class. It was simply that, he says, “electrical energy appeared form of mysterious, in contrast with steel or wooden.”
The trainer assigned a crystal radio mission, he recollects, “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 via an electronics catalog on the lookout for an alternate. A
Graymark five-tube radio caught his eye. It took some convincing earlier than the trainer agreed to let him sort out the mission, which got here with difficult directions and concerned studying easy methods to solder.
“I labored each night time,” Samueli says. “There have been a whole lot 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 trainer was blown away as nicely. And what he stated crystallized Samueli’s future. “He advised me, ‘Henry, truthfully, I by no means ever thought you would do that. However clearly, you’ve received 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 finally utilized to UCLA—a college with a great electrical engineering program and inexpensive tuition that was near house. He went straight via to a Ph.D. however, he says, didn’t actually perceive how radios labored till a number of years past that.
After accumulating his Ph.D. in 1980, Samueli joined TRW to work on protection communications initiatives. He says he beloved each minute. “It’s an incredible alternative to be taught since you’re coping with superhigh tech, the best expertise on the time. And with an enormous funds, you possibly can 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 Photos
Samueli didn’t utterly go away the world of upper training. In his spare time, he taught a circuit-design class at
California State College, Northridge, after which a number of circuits and sign processing courses at UCLA. In 1985, UCLA provided him an assistant professorship, and he left TRW, taking coworker Henry Nicholas with him as his first Ph.D. pupil.
The 2 fashioned the core of what would turn out to be the multidisciplinary communications analysis program in UCLA’s Built-in Circuits and Programs Laboratory. They collaborated with a number of college 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 techniques, numerous architectures. Whereas such a multidisciplinary method is customary at the moment, it was pretty uncommon on the time.”
AT&T Bell Labs was main the world in digital-communications analysis, Samueli recollects, 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 Devices and others.
“It was a software-driven method to constructing digital sign processing,” Samueli says. “And it solely ran at knowledge charges of tens of kilobits per second. Our problem was easy methods to take these algorithms and make them run at tens of
megabits per second—one thousand occasions quicker.”
Samueli and his colleagues concluded {that a} programmable structure utilizing software program was simply too sluggish. In order that they started investigating parallel architectures that might 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. “Right this moment, 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 group weren’t pondering patents whereas they have been doing this analysis. As teachers, 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 discuss and say, ‘That is actually neat stuff. Have you ever ever considered 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 lease an workplace and purchase computer systems and workplace provides.
Samueli saved working full-time at UCLA whereas Broadcom started bringing in small protection contracts: growing a digital frequency synthesizer for TRW, a digital filter for a Rockwell microwave radio, and, for the U.S. Air Drive, a digital filter to guard GPS indicators from jamming.
“These initiatives funded our R&D, and we gained increasingly more information,” says Samueli. [For more on Samueli’s early career, see this 1999 profile.]
Scientific Atlanta Connects with Broadcom
In December 1992, a pupil of Samueli’s
gave a presentation at Globecom (the IEEE International Telecommunications Convention, that’s) a couple of 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,” recollects 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, Normal Instrument. “We had many corporations making chips for Scientific Atlanta, however not that form 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 assist 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, referred to as the
Full Service Community. It wanted a digital modem for that field, however the crucial chips weren’t commercially out there.
“What they have been making an attempt to do in a single chip appeared so significantly better than multichip techniques being developed by others,” says Montreuil. “Once you go from analog to a digital implementation, you must fear about drift, temperature sensitivity, and different points. The extra you possibly can implement within the digital area, the extra predictable is the system.”
Scientific Atlanta awarded a $1 million improvement 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 mission was simple,” 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 supposed to be financially viable, Montreuil says, stating that the core of every house system was a prohibitively costly Solar SPARC workstation. “The objective was to accumulate information and to get our foot within the door for the subsequent technology.”
Broadcom’s modem design impressed each Scientific Atlanta and Normal Instrument. The 2 rivals invested $1 million every, for a ten p.c whole stake within the startup. That funding allowed Broadcom to maintain engaged on digital modems, to cut 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 machine would dramatically lengthen the boundaries of communications,” recollects Chen, who’s now vp of engineering in Broadcom’s broadband video group. “Concepts like superior error correction and digital compression have been round, however they have been all simply elegant theories till Broadcom constructed the primary mixed-signal silicon for broadband communications. Broadcom created an trade.”
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
started collaborating in 1995 to create a global customary referred to as the Knowledge-Over-Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS).
“Individuals would come as much as us after the discuss and say, ‘That is actually neat stuff. Have you ever ever considered commercializing it and beginning an organization?’ ”— Henry Samueli
Round that point, Samueli left UCLA to deal with Broadcom, which had not too long ago 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 go away of absence. He formally stays on go away 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 beneath 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 traces, Broadcom went public in 1998 at a valuation of $1 billion, making Samueli, Nicholas, and lots 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 accordance with the
Orange County Register, the typical worker value practically $6 million.
“We have 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 up enterprise capital traders.”
The SEC Goes After Broadcom’s Inventory Choice Grants
This sharing of the wealth, paradoxically, led to one of many darkest chapters in Samueli’s story. Within the mid-2000s, the U.S. Securities and Trade Fee started investigating using inventory choices at a variety 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 via 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 Court docket Choose
Cormac Carney. After listening to a number of the proof, together with testimony from Samueli and others, the choose “threw all the pieces out,” Samueli says.
Carney appeared notably outraged by the prosecution’s therapy of Samueli.
His ruling acknowledged: “The uncontroverted proof at trial established that Dr. Samueli was a superb engineer and a person of unbelievable integrity. There was no proof at trial to counsel that Dr. Samueli did something fallacious, not to mention legal. But, the federal government launched into a marketing campaign of intimidation and different misconduct to embarrass him and produce him down.”
Says Samueli: “This complete 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 similar time because the inventory choices investigation, he was indicted for distribution of unlawful medication. Nicholas entered rehab in 2008, and
the fees have been finally 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 one of the best.”
Samueli’s Philanthropy and the Giving Pledge
Samueli remained a gradual presence as Broadcom’s chief expertise officer till 2018, persevering with via its acquisition by Avago in 2016. (The ensuing entity is now referred to as
Broadcom Inc.) Since 2018, he’s served as chairman. He nonetheless has an enormous affect on the corporate’s engineers. Charlie Kawwas, president of Broadcom’s semiconductor options group, says that Samueli continues to attend all the division’s technical critiques—about 72 a 12 months, every lasting 2 to three hours.
“He engages with the engineers, asking questions and giving suggestions, they usually love that,” Kawwas says.
On a cruise to Antarctica in 2023, Henry Samueli “went to each lecture…he went on each tour,” a colleague recollects. Lindsey Spindle
Along with his present private wealth
estimated by Forbes at about $20 billion, Samueli spends a lot of his time giving cash away via the Samueli Basis. He additionally chairs the board of the Broadcom Basis. 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 would have liked to begin giving this away. It was simple to think about what I needed to present again to. What created this wealth? My engineering training. And UCLA was that complete training—my bachelor’s, grasp’s, Ph.D., college member. So there was no query in my thoughts that the primary main present could be to
UCLA and the engineering college, 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 packages 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 various therapies together with standard medication and is a ardour of Samueli’s spouse.) The muse 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 increase coaching for nursing, development, maritime, and STEM careers. And the inspiration 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, they usually love that.”— Charlie Kawwas, Broadcom
Altogether the inspiration has distributed greater than $1 billion so far, and it’s on observe to present away a couple of billion extra on this decade, experiences
Lindsey Spindle, president of the Samueli Household Philanthropies, which oversees the inspiration and the household’s different, smaller philanthropic efforts.
“Henry’s engineering background offers him the best structure for philanthropy,” Spindle says. “He is aware of about techniques constructing. He appreciates interconnectivity. When you find yourself constructing {hardware}, you must take into consideration the bigger system by which it’s going to operate, be affected person, and be keen to iterate. Once you care about combating antisemitism, ending homelessness, and reorienting medication in direction of well-being, you additionally should have a techniques orientation and be keen to iterate.”
This 12 months’s IEEE Medal of Honor comes with a big money award—
$2 million, up from $50,000 within the latest previous. Samueli, an IEEE since his pupil 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 group, which Samueli purchased in 2005. Harry How/Getty Photos
Samueli can be the proprietor of the Nationwide Hockey League franchise the
Anaheim Geese. At a look, this would possibly seem to be a typical wealthy man’s plaything—and there’s no doubt that he enjoys his involvement with the group. However the acquisition got here from an impulse to do good. In 2003, the corporate managing the Geese’ house, the Anaheim Enviornment, went bankrupt. Anaheim officers knew Samueli was an energetic businessman within the Ocean County group, they usually requested him to take over administration of the world (now referred to as the Honda Heart). In the meantime, Geese proprietor Disney was desperate to promote the group.
Says Samueli: “In concern of an outsider coming in and transferring the group out of city, we determined that, for the group’s sake, we’d be certain that they keep right here—and discover ways to run a sports activities group.”
“It was an enormous studying curve,” he says. “However in any enterprise, it’s actually in regards to the administration. We put in a great administration group—and received the Stanley Cup in our second 12 months of possession.”
His dive into studying about hockey is attribute of Samueli’s method to simply about all the pieces, 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 provided on the ship. He went on each tour,” she says. In his work with the inspiration, she continued, he’s equally curious and engaged. “He exhibits up at each assembly,” she says. “You’ll be able to ship him a 120-page doc, and he’ll learn each phrase and are available ready to ask questions.”
The hockey group 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 essential a part of our lives,” Samueli says. “And as Broadcom inventory grows, we simply hold placing increasingly more cash into the inspiration. That’s not going to cease. Then, after all, 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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