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

To: DOUG H who wrote (2539)	8/25/1999 8:47:00 PM
From: jackmore	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6531

Doug, Will Terayon license their designs to Broadcom for integration into set top box chips or integrated cable modems? I believe Terayon intends to enter into a shared pool of IPR with Broadcom and other DOCSIS 1.2 participants, but will retain its trade secrets like the others. I believe this will be a royalty free arrangement. It is unclear to me how this will actually work when it comes to making DOCSIS compliant chips or OEM assembled hardware. In fact, I would hypothesize that this one of the difficulties underlying the delay in the standard. But I have no hard information. Regards, jack

To: DOUG H who wrote (2539)	8/25/1999 8:50:00 PM
From: Kenneth Aird	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6531

I searched for Stanford Telecommunications on the US Patent database and found several CDMA patents apparently intended for use with Satellite point to multipoint systems. The press release about the settlement says "Broadcom obtained worldwide, royalty-free license to Stanford's rights in patents related to transmission and receiver technologies capable of use over a cable network". I did not see anything obviously related to S-CDMA, which I understand stands for Synchronous Code Division Multiplexing and supposedly is 5 times more efficient than the CDMA used by cell phones when used over a cable. Do you know if there is any public information about which patents were disputed or which BRCM products allegedly infringed? I'm not aware of any BRCM products that use any form of CDMA. There were some Stanford patents that sounded like techniques that might well be used in current BRCM cable products. Also I read that the S-CDMA patents owned by Terayon have been released to a pool for use by anyone, so the real question is whether BRCM has a deal with TERN to get the S-CDMA designs, or whether they have or can acquire the ability to engineer their own quickly. BRCM does appear to have a lock on the cable modem standards process, and it could be the delay in 1.2 was encouraged by them to give them time to do their own implementation of S-CDMA. Does anyone have any hard evidence to confirm or refute these ideas? I have noticed that BRCM execs have lately been downplaying the importance of cable modems and pushing the importance of home networking, where they now have the clear technology/standards lead.