Broadcom History

Broadcom is an American multinational semiconductor and software company headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, develops, manufactures, and supplies a broad range of semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions. Broadcom’s product offerings serve critical markets including data center, networking, software, broadband, wireless, storage and industrial with roots based in the rich technical heritage of AT&T/Bell Labs, Lucent and Hewlett-Packard/Agilent.

Broadcom Corporation was founded by professor-student pair Henry Samueli and Henry Nicholas from UCLA in 1991.

In 2012 the Linux Foundation listed Broadcom as one of the Top 10 companies contributing to the development of the Linux Kernel for 2011, placing it in the top 5 percent of an estimated 226 contributing companies.

Broadcom organizes the fabrication of the processor chip, most recently the BCM2837 chip and the wifi processor BCM43438, which is used by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The foundation requested help from Broadcom making the Raspberry Pi card, a motherboard which is free of DRM or corporate control of any kind, which can interact with hardware, and which can be bought and controlled by children.

Raspberry Pi is developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in association with Broadcom. Since 2013, Raspberry Pi devices have been developed and supported by a subsidiary of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, now named Raspberry Pi Ltd.

The Raspberry Pi relies on Broadcom’s System on a Chip (SoC) for processing power. This SoC integrates the CPU and other functionalities like graphics processing. Broadcom’s involvement has been crucial in keeping the Raspberry Pi affordable. Because the Raspberry Pi Foundation is focused on education, Broadcom provides the chips at a competitive price since the beginning.