Broadcom designs and makes semiconductor chips for networking
the systems and devices via wire, fiber and wireless. Broadcom
chips transceive data using protocols and media such as
Ethernet, high speed fiber, WiFi, 3G, and Bluetooth. Broadcom's
Indian team just like any other smart semiconductor vendor
is extremely involved through out the design of various
Broadcom products. In fact India team manages large chunk
of Broadcom's products. Rajiv Kapur, Managing Director,
Broadcom India and the recently appointed Rajiv Ramaswami,
Executive VP and General Manager of Network Infrastructure
Group shared some of the trends in the communications specific
semiconductor industry. Here are the details of the interaction
with me.
On the comparison of copper v/s Fiber v/s Wireless:
Rajiv Ramaswami: We work in all areas. There is role for
copper, there is a role for wireless and there is a role
for fiber. Fiber gives high bandwidth - there is no doubt
about it but it does't go everywhere. Whereas, wireless
gives lowest bandwidth - relatively to all this but we can
put it up anywhere. Then the copper is in some sort of middle
- there is lot of existing infrastructure - that is copper
based.
On the question of Copper getting obsolete:
Rajiv Ramaswami: No, I don't think copper will ever get
obsolete. It will play for many years - if we look at some
of things we are doing in copper - we come with a technology
called BroadR-Reach which basically gives up to a KM on
a twisted pairs at 100 M bits/second.
About the benefits of moving to lower nodes like 28
nm to increase the bandwidth:
Rajiv Ramaswami: Oh! huge times. What happens is at the
end of the day - we are trying to cramp more and more capacity
and bandwidth into much more denser footprint. Per example,
we have developed a chip couple of months ago - its 640
Gbit/second chip - you get 64 ports of 10 Gigabits or 16
ports of 40 Gigabits/second.
Limitation of using Silicon and scope of GaAs and Indium
in high speed chips:
Rajiv Ramaswami: Broadcom is entirely silicon and CMOS.
We are not focused on any other (non-silicon semiconductor
material) material, because we fundamentally believe that
we can push silicon to next level. (However he agrees that
in the microwave frequencies close to light the other materials
will play increasing role)
Type of technologies broadcom is adopting in its chips
to protect the information from hacking or any such acts:
Rajiv Ramaswami: We have security products. We build hardware
based key encryption - we call these things as security
processors - per example, in India if we are going down
the UID path - you would want to have a secure authentication.
What we believe- there is a value in having a separate standalone
security co-processor as opposed to running on the main
processor - that is one area - but we look at the communication
chips today - we have all our switching chips with built-in
link encryption.
Regarding making the semiconductor chips more hardware
programmable:
Rajiv Ramaswami: We do have lot of programmability embedded
in our chips. It's not all hardwired features - we allow
user programmability, per example at one extreme of spectrum
we have network processors, where it is a completely programmable
device, and somewhere at the other extreme end the devices
are fully fixed - there is nothing programmable, and we
have chips in the middle, where we do some level of programmability.
About Ethernet's expanding applications including for
audio video streaming:
Rajiv Ramaswami: There is actually a standard called Ethernet
AV that is being adopted slowly for exactly that application.
We feel Ethernet is evolving - Ethernet is not fixed and
it continues to evolve and it has got the volume behind
it. I'll give you an example from my world again - not that
much consumer oriented but data center oriented. If you
look at large data centers, they had Ethernet infrastructures
for their LANs and also had fiber channel infrastructure
for their storage array inputs - what happened over the
last couple of years is that Ethernet standards evolved
to be able to support fiber channel over Ethernet - so now
we don't need two separate networks - we can actually go
put them together into single network in the data center
- so this is the revolution of Ethernet - Ethernet keeps
evolving to meet these new needs.
On cloud computing focus:
Rajiv Ramaswami: We are very engaged in this whole market.
We start inside the server starting with the network interface
- with our family of products 1GB or 10 GB Ethernet - whatever
form factor whether its fiber, whether its copper - we have
that footprint inside the server and then depending on the
kind of server.
About the Broadcom's competitors such as Marvell and
Qualcomm making SoCs for tablet kind of computers:
Rajiv Kapur: We do have a large focus on tablets also. There
are service providers and retail interests in those products.
Broadcom's India team:
Rajiv Ramaswami: Let me tell you what I do with my team
in India. We have a full complete chip design team. The
team here will feel exactly like a team we have in the US.
When you talk about mobile data coming through the backhaul
- whether it is 2G or 3G - there is more backhaul transferred
- the backhaul traffic is all going to the Ethernet and
at the end we are using our chips - all these chips are
being done (designed) here.
What are the skills that you find in abundance and shortage
in the Indian design engineers?
Rajiv Ramaswami: In India actually we have been very
successful about putting together a very strong team with
a reasonable blend of senior technical talent and a lot
of junior people now. One of the challenges - I would say
most companies face here is - finding senior technical talent,
not easy to find. We get a lot of people who are 1 to 5
yrs of experience. (Both agree there is more digital talent
available compared to analog).
Suggestions to academia and students:
Rajiv Ramaswami: I would like to see engineers with
a broad base education to come in and many of them get trained
on the job. We are happy to take them in and train them
and get them to be productive over time - but what we are
looking forward to is standard engineers.
Engagement with Indian telecom service providers and
OEMs:
Rajiv Ramaswami: We are very engaged with service providers
- for us India is a very big market - particularly India
going 3G - lot more backhaul traffic coming from mobile
networks. Access is fairly important area.
Indian telecom equipment companies buying chips from
Broadcom:
Rajiv Ramaswami: There are some local companies, but most
part; there are not a lot of local telecom equipment companies
- Tejas Networks per example. I think for us some of the
things we tend to work is - we work directly with service
provider - as a chip supplier - we tried to understand what
there requirements are and in turn work with their equipment
supplier to help to them deliver the right product.
Rajiv Kapur: We are so diverse as a company. The diversity
of the service provider overlaps with us. Take per example
Bharti - it goes from settop boxes to handsets to CPEs -
so there are lot of diversity and that's our diversity -
so the number of topics they need to talk to us is a lot
- and they are also driving convergence - they want OS,
video, data - they want convergence in same network. They
start talking to us lot more because they want set-top box
customer to also their mobile phone customers. The 2nd thing
is we also end up designing chip - it's hard to say for
country like India, but for emerging market with unique
problems - BroadR-Reach is good example of it. We also talked
to potential Indian players - would you like to start new
business to deliver a product to that telco interested in
- because we see the synergies of Indian Telco wanted to
buy from Indian OEM also - but their readiness is not in
our control. India is a huge end market for us.
