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Technology Stocks : Broadcom (BRCM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Doughboy who wrote (2129)	6/30/1999 11:55:00 AM
From: DOUG H	Respond to of 6531

ANALYSTS LAUD BROADCOM as "the classic technology company" with an engineering team second to none. "Line them up-engineer to engineer-and you won't find a company more intelligent than Broadcom," says Morgan Stanley Dean Witter analyst Mark Edelstone. Cofounder and Chief Technology Officer Henry Samueli, a former UCLA professor, didn't cull that talent from Silicon Valley. He found UCLA, a school better known for basketball, to be as intellectually fertile as any. And his communications-on-a-chip technology addresses the hottest market around: the Internet. ASAP: What is a chip company like Broadcom doing for the Internet? Samueli: Our chip sets go in set-top boxes that increase the bandwidth and speed of the Internet by orders of magnitude. It's fairly complicated, but we take the analog solution to data transfer and do it digitally. It's faster, cost efficient, and more reliable. There are plenty of competitors with good analog solutions. But it's a great challenge to do it digitally. You need clever analog experts, great systems design, and you need sharp digital designers to create the DSP (digital signal processing) engines. Frankly, it took a decade of R&D at UCLA to come up with the complete solution. ASAP: So what's going to drive the masses to buy these set-top boxes? Samueli: That's what everybody is feverishly working on today. You have two fronts that are going to drive it: the PC and the television. On the PC side, you have the thirst to upgrade to multimedia or video traffic. On the television side, it's a similar paradigm. You're going to have digital set-top boxes with Web content integrated over the cable network with cable-modem capabilities. ASAP: But aren't you relying on historically very slow-moving industries when you deal with the telcos and cable companies? Samueli: The AT&T acquisition of TCI is a huge sign that traditional telephone companies see cable as the opportunity of the future. The threat of competition from cable companies delivering telco service and telcos delivering video service is going to force both sides to move very quickly. ASAP: Do you worry about somebody big putting together a similar technology? Samueli: It can be done on paper, but it is not easy to execute. The one thing that we work the hardest on here at Broadcom is recruiting. We have recruited the best talent on the planet, period. It's not enough to offer very smart people lots of money. They want to work in an exciting environment with other very smart people. ASAP: Everyone thinks they have the best and brightest. What distinguishes the engineers at Broadcom? Samueli: When I was a professor at UCLA, we created an R&D group that represented a new paradigm of engineers. And that program has given us dozens of Ph.D and master's students. They understand system design. They understand DSP. And they understand chip design. It's extremely rare for a graduate to be trained like that. Most university training programs focus on one particular subject-they go very deep and very narrow. We wanted people to know a lot of different things. I certainly got a lot of flak in the early days. People thought I was way off. I think I proved them wrong. —Interview by David Raymond DougHboy, Did I get DougH first?<gg> There is not much overlap between BRCM/vtss/pmcs.