Broadcom designs and develops chipsets for wireless and wired telecommunications. Founded in 1991, it has grown to a turnover of $8.2 Billion and a staff of 11,300 worldwide. Claiming to be the world's largest fabless chip design company, it sub-contracts manufacture of over 2 billion chips annually. With a string of over 50 acquisitions, it has widened it's scope and established leadership positions in nearly a dozen product categories.
Small Cells
Broadcom acquired Percello for $86 million in November 2010, when we interviewed Greg Fischer, Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom's Broadband Carrier Access line of business, into whom the new subsiduary reports.
At that time, Percello had established a position in 3G femtocell SoC chips, supplying vendors including Ubiquisys. Since then, they have added other vendors and continue to grow market share particularly for residential 3G femtocells. Their BCM61670 SoC supported HSPA+ data speeds and up to 8 concurrent users, while consuming only 1.5Watts of power.
In June 2011, Ubiquisys announced they were further developing their use of Broadcom chips with an integrated home gateway design using many Broadcom parts. Alcatel-Lucent also announced a reference design using Broadcom chips, alongside their existing Picochip (now Mindspeed) solution.
In October 2012, Huawei selected Broadcom's SoC for their ePicoXX series of small cells.
The range of chipsets expanded with support for both 3G and LTE, and has been incorporated into many designs and grown in capacity.
However in 2016, Broadcom determined that continued R&D investment was better spent elsewhere and downsized their team. Existing products continue to be supported but they have been withdrawn from their website and would appear to be no longer actively sold to new customers. We broke the news about Broadcom's downsizing small cell operation in October 2016
