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.
Growth by acquisition
Broadcom’s scale is largely the product of serial mega-mergers, blending chips and software:
| Year | Deal | What it added |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | Avago + Broadcom | The combined chip firm and the Broadcom name |
| 2018 | CA Technologies | Enterprise/mainframe software |
| 2019 | Symantec (enterprise) | Cybersecurity software |
| 2023 | VMware | Data-center virtualization software |
Where it fits
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, fabricated (like most advanced chips) by a foundry such as TSMC.