# Broadcom

> An American chip designer behind data center networking, Wi-Fi and custom AI chips.

- Level: Intermediate
- Topics: Tech companies, Hardware
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/broadcom/
- In Spanish: [Broadcom](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/broadcom/)

**Broadcom** designs chips that most people never see but use every day. Today's company was formed in 2016, when Avago Technologies, a chipmaker whose roots go back to Hewlett-Packard's semiconductor division, bought the original Broadcom Corporation and took its name. Like NVIDIA or Apple, it is **fabless**: it designs the chips and pays foundries such as TSMC to manufacture them.

Its chips cover several areas. Its **switch chips** move data between the thousands of servers in a data center, so they are central to the networks that connect GPUs for AI training. It makes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips for phones, chips for broadband modems and set-top boxes, and controllers for storage. It also builds **custom AI accelerators** (ASICs) together with large tech companies: the customer brings its ideas, Broadcom turns them into a chip that can be manufactured. Google's TPU is the best-known example.

Broadcom has grown mostly through acquisitions, and in recent years it bought large software companies too: CA Technologies, the enterprise security business of Symantec and, in 2023, VMware, the leading maker of virtualization software. Its usual approach is to focus on the products and big customers that bring the most profit, which sometimes means price and licensing changes that customers notice.

## An analogy

A firm that makes the plumbing inside buildings. You never see the pipes, valves and pumps behind the walls, but nothing works without them, and the architects of the biggest towers ask it to design custom pieces.

## Keep in mind

- Fabless chip designer; foundries such as TSMC manufacture its designs.
- Its switch chips are key to data center and AI networks.
- Co-designs custom AI chips (ASICs), such as Google's TPU, with big tech companies.
- Grew through acquisitions, including VMware in 2023.

## Go deeper

- [About Broadcom (official site)](https://www.broadcom.com/company/about-us)
- [Broadcom on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom)

## Related terms

- [Chip](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/semiconductor-chip/): A sliver of silicon carrying billions of tiny switches that compute and remember.
- [NVIDIA](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/nvidia/): The company that sells the shovels of the AI gold rush.
- [Apple](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/apple/): The company that sells the iPhone and the Mac, plus the services that run on them.
- [TSMC](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/tsmc/): The factory that makes the world's most advanced chips for everyone else.
- [Server](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/server/): A computer whose job is to answer requests from other computers, all day, every day.
- [Data center](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/data-center/): A building full of servers where the internet, the cloud and AI actually run.
- [GPU](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/gpu/): The chip that does thousands of simple calculations at once.
- [Artificial intelligence](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/artificial-intelligence/): Getting computers to do things that, until recently, only people could do.