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Rumor: Broadcom Phasing Out Wi-Fi Chip Business (digitimes.com)
jones_supa writes: According to sources in Taiwan at the heart of the electronics industry, Broadcom is looking to phase out its Wi-Fi chip business in a move to streamline its workforce and product offerings following its acquisition by Avago Technologies. In general, the Wi-Fi chip business yields relatively low gross margins compared to other product lines due to fierce price competition in the market for mass-market applications (such as notebooks, tablets, TVs and smartphones). Companies such as MediaTek, Realtek Semiconductor and RDA Microelectronics have already received a pull-in of short lead-time orders from Broadcom's customers in the Wi-Fi sector. Following its merger with Avago, Broadcom is expected to allocate more RD resources to solutions in the fiber-optic and server sectors. In addition, Broadcom has almost halved the workforce stationed at its office in Taipei.
Let's hope this rumour is right. One less shitty vendor with shitty WLAN chips. Then Apple and Dell have to look elswhere to fsck over their customers with crappy hardware without working (Linux) drivers.
Which plague did them in? I bet it was the blood.
I went through this with Avago's last acquisition. If there is any division within Broadcom/Avago that cannot meet 50% GM it will be cut/sold.
Investing in the future is only done if it also has returns now. The whole idea behind Avago is to pull the money out of existing products. R&D is primarily support. For new product lines they buy the market winners and repeat the process.
It sounds like wifi does not return enough and the money would be better used buying some other company. I expect this acquisition is also bad news for r-pi as the CEO thinks IOT is not worth investing in.
A supposed news piece that starts with "rumor?" I naïvely hoped it was a piece of information about how that kind of rumor spreads, but no. Journalism is dead, at least here.
There's nothing like $HOME
Don't start the party yet. The rumor is false. Digitimes did not improve their jurnalistic skills and Slashdot seems to swallow anything that appears online...
Considering how anti-open source Broadcom is they won't be missed. Can't be phased out quickly enough, the worst thing is to receive some device with broadcom chipset and being unable to use it since there aren't any drivers and you can't develop your own since it's a 'corporate secret'.
Wifi for ... notebooks, tablets, TVs and smartphones.
One of those is not like the others.
Posting anonymous because reasons. Read the play-by-play of what has happened with this acquisition here: https://www.thelayoff.com/broa... This is what is going one as confirmed from inside. If you don't make your margins you're fucked. God speed to all of us still there....
They figure they wanted to get out before anybody else figures out that people stopped using wifi. After all why use wifi when cables can do the job? Oh wait.
To be fair about cables, they are plug-n-play. Just plug it in and the dhcp server does the rest. However setup isn't the main issue. I don't think anything can make people stop using wifi. I bet most people would stick to it even if the health issue thing turns out to be proven and far worse than worst claims.
Then again people in some African city stopped using mobile phones at some point because of a rumor that the signals were designed to make the male member shrink so much that it would make reproduction impossible. Seems like some people will believe anything if the culprit is supposed to be the US government.
Guess what happens when consumer routers stop having Broadcom chips in them...
That company was all about internal political infighting amongst the different groups vying for control of different product lines.
I wonder what Upton has to say about this?
Broadcom manufactured all sorts of cheap chips, which mostly worked, and made all sorts of devices possible. Broadcom had their little MIPS cores, which they'd stick into all sorts of stuff. Cheap wifi router? Pentium class MIPS core. Blu ray player? Pentium 3 class core, with some specialized hardware, and more Pentium class cores. When I'd read all the stuff that was on each chip, I'd marvel that the chip would sell for several bucks in large numbers. Seriously, the amount of time required to write the software for their $30 router must be enormous.
I can also see the market for high quality, open source hardware, but you got to expect higher prices.
As for higher profit margins, are these buyers foolish? Broadcom designs lots of commodity chips for low profit margins. What do you expect from Broadcom?
They still have (or at least did yesterday) a number of openings for WiFi firmware engineers. Hiring was shut down (or at least jobs weren't posted on their website) for quite a while during the merger, and these WiFi (and other) jobs are recent additions to the list, posted in the last few days or weeks. That seems inconsistent with shutting down the division. Odd..
> fierce price competition in the market for mass-market applications
I herd u like markets.
You wouldn't know it on the internet, but you would expect an editor to catch obvious errors.
Businesses. It's the plural of business. It looks like there was an irrelevant attempt made at some possessiveness instead, though even that failed by dropping the post-apostrophe "s".
Previous Avago acquisitions made sense, not this one !
Knowing what Avago does best and also the product lineup and/or core competency of Broadcom, I have absolutely no idea what Avago sees in Broadcom
Customers?
Product Channels?
Region of coverage?
As an investor in Avago, I am very alarmed with the acquisition of Broadcom !
If you want to know why Broadcom's wifi chips are on the cutting board look at Inari of Malaysia
That Malaysian joint is a shell game - it does not innovate but yet it get to sell chips to Avago - so much so Inari has become one of the brightest star in the Malaysian Stock Exchange
Why Avago buys from Inari while it gets to source all the chips it wants in Korea / Taiwan or Japan? Because of Hock
Hock is from Malaysia, and Inari is one of his 'boiler room programs' still functioning - and right now, Inari does not have wifi chips on its offering, yet
I won't be surprised if Inari happens to be the 'white knight' of Broadcom's wifi division, and with that, Avago gets to source all its Wifi needs from Inari, of Malaysia
If Broadcom WiFi chipsets and their other consumer product lines are going away, it's really bad news for several key Maker community and OSS platforms. And decent alternatives are dropping off as well. Now, Broadcom was famous for being nearly impossible to work with, for smaller companies - no documentation, no support, no parts availability. And this was by design, that they would only work with 'tier one' customers. Raspberry Pi happened because it was developed by Broadcom folks in UK in their spare time, using a Broadcom set-top-box chipset. The talented Pi team just designed into the latest model 3 a BCM4343(43438), which looks good on paper and even includes BT. But will it, and the main CPU BCM2837, be around in two years? The Electric Imp and spark.io (now Particle) Photon WiFi modules are based on the Broadcom WICED environment. The WRT community grew around Atheros and Ralink chipsets, sporting Linux on MIPS32. Atheros now belongs to Qualcomm, which has been struggling and had layoffs. Ralink was bought by Mediatek, and WiFi is far from their core business. Atmel (think Arduino) came out with an interesting WiFi module, ATSAMW25 that includes a programmable ARM. And now Microchip, the purveyor of the kludgy PIC processor, is buying Atmel.