Broadcom Corporation was an American fabless semiconductor company that made products for the wireless and broadband communication industry.

It was acquired by Avago Technologies for $37 billion in 2016 and currently[update] operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of the merged entity Broadcom Inc.

[1] In 1998, Broadcom became a public company on the NASDAQ exchange (ticker symbol: BRCM) and employs about 11,750 people worldwide in more than 15 countries.[when?]

[7] In June 2007, the U.S. International Trade Commission blocked the import of new cell phone models based on particular Qualcomm microchips.

[8] In January 2017, the FTC sued Qualcomm, who allegedly made use of unlawful tactics to maintain "a monopoly on cellular-communications chips.

As part of the settlement, Qualcomm paid $891 million in cash to Broadcom over a four-year period ending June 2013.

[11] In March 2006, a report by the Center for Financial Research and Analysis identified Broadcom as one of 17 companies "at risk" for having back-dated stock options grants between 1997 and 2002.

[15][16] On January 24, 2007, Broadcom announced a restatement of its financial results from 1998 to 2005 to include a total of $2.24 billion-worth of expenses related to stock option-based compensation.

[18] In its complaint, the SEC alleged that Broadcom's top officers at the time had misrepresented the dates on which stock options were granted to executives and employees.

"[18] On May 15, 2008, Broadcom co-founder and CTO Henry Samueli resigned as chairman of the board, and took a leave of absence as Chief Technology Officer.

[citation needed] On June 5, 2008, Broadcom co-founder and former CEO Henry Nicholas and former CFO William Ruehle were indicted on charges of illegal stock-option backdating.

[20][21] In other words, in 2008, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged executives of Broadcom with fraudulently backdating stock options.

Additionally, the company produces transceiver and processor ICs for Ethernet and wireless LANs, cable modems, digital subscriber lines, servers, home networking devices (router, switches, port-concentrators) and cellular phones (GSM/GPRS/EDGE/W-CDMA/LTE).

[35][36] Examples of switches using the Trident II XGS chip are the Dell Networking S6000,[37] Cisco Nexus 9000,[38] and some smaller vendors like the EdgeCore AS6700, Penguin Arctica 3200XL, and QuantaMesh T5032.

According to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, this made it "the first ARM-based multimedia SoC with fully functional, vendor-provided (as opposed to partial, reverse-engineered) fully open-source drivers", although due to substantial binary firmware code, which must be executing in parallel with the operating system, and which executes independently and prior to loading of the operating system, this claim has not been universally accepted.

The company planned a custom-built headquarters campus just south of the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, California.

It originally intended to occupy the entire campus, but after the Avago acquisition, it sold the site to FivePoint Holdings and then leased back only two of the four buildings.

The company has many other research and development sites including Silicon Fen, Cambridge (UK), Bangalore and Hyderabad in India, Richmond (near Vancouver) and Markham (near Toronto) in Canada and Sophia Antipolis in France.