The key to true technology innovation is collaboration and the sharing of intellectual property with colleagues and other industry visionaries.
That’s the message that Broadcom co-founder and CTO Henry Samueli conveyed in a recent article and one that is actively being promoted by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which is seeking input on new ways to drive more collaboration among intellectual property organizations around the world.
Click to see graphic
The need for IP sharing is more important now than ever as the complexity and capabilities of integrated circuits continue to increase at an astonishing pace, with one million transistor chips in the early 1990s evolving to one billion transistor chips today.
Because today’s complex chip designs often leverage open-market IP for reuse of standard functional blocks, the time-to-market and development efficiency are improved.
At Broadcom, collaboration is alive and well within the organization. In fact, leveraging existing IP from the company’s own broad portfolio of engineering expertise is as easy as logging on to a centralized portal.
Broadcom has developed a unique and efficient system for IP sharing and unified design flows through its centralized engineering organization and IP library. This unified design approach encourages collaboration across business units, eliminates areas of potential overlap, dramatically reduces engineering costs and time-to-market, and provides the company with a powerfully competitive advantage.
For example, Broadcom’s unique ability to combine the best of IP from throughout the organization is the introduction of the new StrataGX™ and BCM4708x System on a Chip (SoC) devices – the industry’s first to combine a high performance processor, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch, GbE physical layer transceivers (PHYs), USB 3.0 and traffic accelerators all on a single chip.
Engineers from two of Broadcom’s business groups – the Infrastructure & Networking group and Mobile and Wireless group - seamlessly collaborated to develop not only the StrataGX series for SMB routers and network attached storage (NAS) devices but also the BCM4708x series for home routers and gateways. Designed as companions to Broadcom’s full line of 5G WiFi (802.11ac) solutions, the new SoCs offer a complete end-to-end solution to enable stand-alone platforms to achieve the Gigabit wireless speeds that 5G WiFi can deliver.
Those connectivity speeds will allow multiple users in the home or office to simultaneously stream video content or download high bandwidth applications 10 times faster than the current networks – and without the buffering and interruptions that come with them.
Broadcom is working to ensure that technology moves at 5G WiFi speeds for all users, whether they’re at home, in the office or on the road. In part, Broadcom’s efforts are made possible by bringing together best-of-breed engineering from teams that serve both enterprise and consumer markets and encouraging them to collaborate on best ways to engineer the technologies of the future.
Related: 5G WiFi: Pioneering the New Generation of Wireless Connectivity