Also known as: Broadcom Inc, Broadcom Corporation
Broadcom is an American semiconductor and infrastructure-software company that makes networking, broadband, and wireless chips, including the systems-on-chip used in the Raspberry Pi.1
Overview
The modern Broadcom traces back to a 1991 chip company and grew through a long series of mergers — most notably with Avago Technologies in 2016, after which the combined firm took the Broadcom name. Its products span Ethernet switch silicon, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips, set-top-box and broadband processors, and storage controllers.2
Broadcom designs the BCM-series SoCs that power Raspberry Pi boards, pairing an Arm CPU with a graphics core on one chip. In recent years the company has also expanded heavily into enterprise software through large acquisitions.
Why it matters
Broadcom’s networking and wireless chips are inside a vast amount of consumer and data-center equipment, often unseen. For the maker world its most visible role is the Raspberry Pi SoC — which means a GopherTrunk capture node running on a Pi is, at its core, running on Broadcom silicon.