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Broadcom Founder Samueli Scoops $100,000 Marconi Prize

The pioneer has been awarded for his involvement in the development and commercialisation of broadband circuits, in particular the cable modem

Henry Samueli, co-founder of Broadcom Corporation, has won the 2012 Marconi Society Prize and Fellowship.

Samueli, whose work led to the explosive growth of the consumer broadband industry, was selected for his pioneering advances in the development and commercialisation of analogue and mixed signal circuits for modern communication systems.

These innovations built the foundation of Irvine, Calif.-based Broadcom Corporation and enabled the company's subsequent expansion into other broadband markets such as Ethernet networking and wireless communications. Since its founding in 1991, Broadcom has grown to become one of the world's leading suppliers of communications semiconductors.

The Marconi Prize is given each year to one or more scientists and engineers who, like radio inventor Guglielmo Marconi, achieve advances in communications and information technology for the social, economic and cultural development of all humanity. Winners have included scientists whose breakthrough innovations underlie every aspect of modern communications and have contributed to many other fields of technology, as well.

Winning the Marconi Prize is particularly appropriate for Samueli, whose career was inspired by an assignment to build a radio in his seventh grade shop class. "I wasn't surprised it worked - I'm sort of a perfectionist -but I had no idea how it worked," he says. "At that moment it became my mission in life to find out how radios worked. By the time I received my Ph.D. in electrical engineering, I finally did understand it."

The son of Holocaust survivors who arrived penniless in the U.S. in 1950, Samueli worked weekends in his family's liquor store in East Los Angeles while attending middle school and high school as a stellar student. With his parents' encouragement and financial support, he was accepted at UCLA, the only college to which he applied. At UCLA he earned his bachelor's degree (1975), master's degree (1976), and Ph.D. degree (1980), all in electrical engineering.

After receiving his Ph.D., Samueli took a job at technology leader TRW (later merged with Northrop Grumman) working on military broadband communication systems. His graduate advisor and mentor at UCLA, Professor Alan Willson, invited him to teach part-time at UCLA as well. He taught a graduate-level digital filters course. "Henry got better student reviews than I did," Willson says. "Students loved him."

In 1985, Samueli joined the UCLA faculty full-time as an assistant professor and quickly rose through the ranks. His industrial career had yielded several interesting ideas to pursue and he quickly put together a team of researchers. "One of his strengths was that he knew what was on the cutting edge of communications systems and that was what he set his group to work on," Willson says. "They were studying big problems that attracted big funding."

Professor Leonard Kleinrock, a renowned UCLA colleague, remembers being pulled aside by a key DARPA funding decision maker. "You have a world-class digital signal processing designer in Samueli," he said. "It was clear to me then," Kleinrock says, "that Samueli was enormously well-respected outside the university. To see that external confirmation of his brilliance was impressive."

Those skills also caught the eye of large corporations that wanted to commercialize the innovations. In August 1991, Samueli and Henry T. Nicholas, III, his former colleague at TRW and his first Ph.D. student at UCLA, each invested $5,000 and launched Broadcom out of Nicholas' Redondo Beach garage. Their first major commercial customer was Scientific-Atlanta, which needed chips for an experimental digital cable TV set-top box. 

They quickly delivered an affordable chipset (re-engineered into a single chip just ten months later) for the world's first commercially deployed digital cable TV receiver. Scientific-Atlanta and Broadcom announced a strategic partnership in 1994 to develop digital TV technology"“ a watershed moment for Samueli and his fledgling company, which then had just 24 employees.

Their next big success leveraged Samueli's extraordinary digital signal processing (DSP) expertise. Competing for a chance at 3Com's Ethernet business, Broadcom claimed it could create a 100BaseT4 Fast Ethernet chip using DSP techniques rather than purely analogue approaches previously in use. No one believed them, but Broadcom delivered a working solution in just one year.


There were many more "firsts" and "fastest" to come, including becoming the first semiconductor company to enable the DOCSIS standards-based solution that now has nearly 100% adoption in the cable modem industry.

 

On April 17, 1998 Broadcom went public in a record-setting IPO. Samueli continued to serve as Co-Chairman and Chief Technical Officer, shaping Broadcom's research and development activities while helping coordinate company-wide engineering development strategies. Since its IPO, Broadcom has continued its extraordinary trajectory and Samueli has enjoyed the opportunities afforded by its success.


He and his wife Susan launched The Samueli Foundation in 1999, which so far has donated more than $250 million. Much of their philanthropy has to do with education, including endowing the engineering schools at UCLA and UC Irvine. They also founded the Sala and Aron Samueli Holocaust Memorial Library at Chapman University in honour of Henry's parents. Their foundation supports numerous science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs.


On his selection for the Marconi Prize, Samueli says, "I'm very humbled. I look at the list of Marconi Fellows preceding me and think, "˜I don't belong in that group.' It is an amazing honour and I'm deeply flattered. On the other hand, looking at it more broadly, as a company we have indeed accomplished a lot. I'm very proud of the impact we have had on our industry and on society."


Professor Willson will present the $100,000 Marconi Prize to Samueli at the annual Marconi Society Awards Dinner in Irvine, California on September 6.


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