In 1991, only a few individuals had Internet access. Those that did put up in on-line boards or electronic mail mates from residence sometimes accessed the Internet through phone line, their messages touring at a high velocity of 14.4 kilobits per second. In the meantime, cable TV was rocketing in recognition. By 1991, sixty percent of U.S. households subscribed to a cable service; cable rollouts in the remainder of the world had been additionally selecting up velocity.
Hypothetically, utilizing that rising cable community as an alternative of cellphone traces for Web entry would dramatically increase the velocity of communications. And making cable TV itself digital as an alternative of analog would enable cable suppliers to hold many extra channels. The idea 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 type—was effectively 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 crew 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 know-how.
Right now, 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 gadgets. For these advances, together with contributions to increasing science, know-how, 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 youngsters; 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 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 individuals, 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 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 Methods”
Earlier than the Cable Modem—Manner Earlier than
Samueli began down the trail that will 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 venture, 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 by means of an electronics catalog searching for another. A
Graymark five-tube radio caught his eye. It took some convincing earlier than the trainer agreed to let him sort out the venture, which got here with difficult directions and concerned studying how you can 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 effectively. And what he mentioned crystallized Samueli’s future. “He informed me, ‘Henry, actually, I by no means ever thought you can do that. However clearly, you’ve acquired some particular presents. I feel it’s 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 electrical engineering program and reasonably priced tuition that was near residence. He went straight by means of to a Ph.D. however, he says, didn’t actually perceive how radios labored till just a few years past that.
After accumulating his Ph.D. in 1980, Samueli joined TRW to work on protection communications tasks. He says he liked each minute. “It’s an incredible alternative to be taught since you’re coping with superhigh tech, the best know-how on the time. And with an enormous price range, you possibly can construct very subtle 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 training. In his spare time, he taught a circuit-design class at
California State University, Northridge, after which a number of circuits and sign processing lessons 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. scholar.
The 2 fashioned the core of what would grow to be the multidisciplinary communications analysis program in UCLA’s Built-in Circuits and Methods 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 methods, numerous architectures. Whereas such a multidisciplinary method is normal in the present day, 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 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 how you can 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. So that they started investigating parallel architectures that might implement subtle 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 now, 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 features 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 crew weren’t pondering patents whereas they had 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. “Folks 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 stored 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 Pressure, a digital filter to guard GPS alerts from jamming.
“These tasks funded our R&D, and we gained increasingly more data,” 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 International Telecommunications Convention, that’s) a few prototype 10-plus megabit-per-second digital modem chip the group had developed.
“What was completely 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, General Instrument. “We had many corporations making chips for Scientific Atlanta, however not that form of chip.”
After the presentation, Montreuil approached the scholar, 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 significant 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 Network. It wanted a digital modem for that field, however the essential chips weren’t commercially accessible.
“What they had been making an attempt to do in a single chip appeared so significantly better than multichip methods being developed by others,” says Montreuil. “Once you go from analog to a digital implementation, you need to 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 venture was easy,” Samueli says, “as a result of it was primarily based on the prototype designs we had already finished. 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 residence system was a prohibitively costly Solar SPARC workstation. “The objective was to amass data and to get our foot within the door for the subsequent era.”
Broadcom’s modem design impressed each Scientific Atlanta and Basic Instrument. The 2 rivals invested $1 million every, for a ten p.c complete stake within the startup. That funding allowed Broadcom to maintain engaged on digital modems, to cut back the price by placing all of the features on a single chip.
Sherman Chen was a senior engineer at Basic Instrument on the time. “We knew then that the Broadcom gadget would dramatically lengthen the boundaries of communications,” recollects Chen, who’s now vice chairman 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 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 shortly, and it was changing into clear to cable operators that this new know-how would require standardization. Broadcom, CableLabs, Basic Instrument, LANcity, 3Com, and others
began collaborating in 1995 to create a global normal referred to as the Data-Over-Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS).
“Folks 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 of 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 beneath contract. The BCM3100 was an under-$20, single-chip, DOCSIS-compatible digital modem. In 1996, Broadcom added one other kind of product: digital Ethernet chips, what Samueli says was the world’s first all-digital implementation of Ethernet know-how. 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 staff rich. By mid-2000, that valuation had jumped to greater than $60 billion, with Samueli’s stake price about $10 billion, and, in keeping with the
Orange County Register, the common worker price practically $6 million.
“We had been a really beneficiant firm to our staff,” Samueli says. “We gave inventory to just about all people within the firm. We had it to provide as a result of we didn’t dilute our shares by taking up venture capital buyers.”
The SEC Goes After Broadcom’s Inventory Possibility Grants
This sharing of the wealth, mockingly, led to one of many darkest chapters in Samueli’s story. Within the mid-2000s, the U.S. Securities and Change Fee started investigating using 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 means of 5 years of hell. It’s scary. 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 Decide
Cormac Carney. After listening to among the proof, together with testimony from Samueli and others, the choose “threw the whole lot out,” Samueli says.
Carney appeared notably outraged by the prosecution’s therapy of Samueli.
His ruling stated: “The uncontroverted proof at trial established that Dr. Samueli was an excellent engineer and a person of unbelievable integrity. There was no proof at trial to recommend that Dr. Samueli did something unsuitable, 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 entire choices backdating scandal was distress, however I wouldn’t change what we did. I feel being overly beneficiant to staff 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 perfect.”
Samueli’s Philanthropy and the Giving Pledge
Samueli remained a gradual presence as Broadcom’s chief know-how officer till 2018, persevering with by means of 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 the entire division’s technical evaluations—about 72 a 12 months, 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 recollects. Lindsey Spindle
Together with his present private wealth
estimated by Forbes at about $20 billion, Samueli spends a lot of his time giving money away by means 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 provide 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 consider what I needed to provide again to. What created this wealth? My engineering education. And UCLA was that complete training—my bachelor’s, grasp’s, Ph.D., school member. So there was no query in my thoughts that the primary main present can 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 standard drugs and is a ardour of Samueli’s spouse.) The inspiration additionally targets tasks aimed 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 tasks 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 inspiration has distributed greater than $1 billion thus far, and it’s on monitor to provide away a few billion extra on this decade, stories
Lindsey Spindle, president of the Samueli Household Philanthropies, which oversees the inspiration and the household’s different, smaller philanthropic efforts.
“Henry’s engineering background provides him the fitting structure for philanthropy,” Spindle says. “He is aware of about methods constructing. He appreciates interconnectivity. If you find yourself constructing {hardware}, you need to take into consideration the bigger system during which it’s 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 methods orientation and be prepared 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 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 straight for the previous three years.
Henry Samueli and his spouse, Susan, rejoice the Stanley Cup victory for the Anaheim Geese hockey crew, which Samueli purchased in 2005. Harry How/Getty Photographs
Samueli can be the proprietor of the Nationwide Hockey League franchise the
Anaheim Ducks. At a look, this may look like a typical wealthy man’s plaything—and there’s no doubt that he enjoys his involvement with the crew. However the acquisition got here from an impulse to do good. In 2003, the corporate managing the Geese’ residence, the Anaheim Enviornment, went bankrupt. Anaheim officers knew Samueli was an energetic businessman within the Ocean County group, and so they requested him to take over administration of the sector (now referred to as the Honda Heart). In the meantime, Geese proprietor Disney was desirous to promote the crew.
Says Samueli: “In worry of an outsider coming in and transferring the crew out of city, we determined that, for the group’s sake, we might ensure that they keep right here—and learn to run a sports activities crew.”
“It was an enormous studying curve,” he says. “However in any enterprise, it’s actually in regards to the administration. We put in administration crew—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 the whole lot, 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 among 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 may ship him a 120-page doc, and he’ll learn each phrase and are available ready to ask questions.”
The hockey crew 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 necessary 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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