Broadcom boss Scott McGregor spells out the top tech trends of 2015 (interview)

Above: Tiny streaming device for smart TVs.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

VB: What are you doing with new cable set-top boxes?

McGregor: It’s a little on the geeky side, but this is DOCSIS 3.1. It’s the new cable standard that’ll do north of a gigabit to your home. This will make a huge difference in terms of driving Internet performance for a lot of people across the world.

This is the cable that’s used in most cars today to connect to cameras and stuff like that. It’s kind of expensive. That’s an expensive connector there. We’ve replaced it with this, which is cheap twisted-pair wire and these cheap connectors. This is substantially lower weight, much cheaper, and 10 to 100 times faster. It’s Ethernet technology.

We’re working to tie in all the different devices in the car — cameras, antennas, and video. We’re shipping today in BMW’s i8, i3, and X5. It’s a technology we developed for the IT space that’s now working in a car and improving it. We believe it’ll be in pretty much all cars eventually. You can also run power over this technology, so you eliminate all the power wiring that goes to different devices. When you put an antenna on the roof, that’s all you need to run to it. It has power and signal. It’s very efficient.

We have lots and lots of set-top boxes. The theme now is 4K. We’re seeing how we can quickly get 4K P60 out there. VP9 technology is interesting if you’re into YouTube and things like that. That’s the codec they use for driving a lot of their video. We have Android TV as well for 4K apps.

We do many different form factors, because our customers want everything from big boxes to small boxes. One thing we see is that they increasingly want set-top boxes to be small. This is a set-top box right here that includes wireless LAN and everything built into the board. You can make these tiny little boxes. They almost become set-back boxes instead, which is really nice, getting the form factor down there.

We have Powerline technology for wiring up your house. Outdoor units for satellite, bringing that in there. This is the DSL row here.

VB: Are the Powerline devices, or Ethernet over your power wiring in your home, getting used a lot?

McGregor: It varies by country a little bit. It’s more popular in Europe than it is here. Here, wireless LAN is a little more popular. We have really good satellite technology that integrates everything together. Small cells are interesting. We believe that small cells enable you to get cellular capability indoors in many places. Some cellular carriers are deploying these pretty broadly, others less so. Some carriers are including a small cell in every set-top box, which means that you can create a mesh net as a cellular carrier.

VB: The cellular expanders, are they being regulated now?

McGregor: They are regulated, because they use regulated frequencies.

Above: Broadcom smart toys

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

VB: I just wondered what could happen there.

McGregor: You have to buy it through your carrier. It’s not something you can just buy on Amazon. You have to buy it through AT&T or Verizon or somebody.

VB: Could it mess up somebody else’s signal if you boost your own?

McGregor: That’s why the carriers want to control it. The devices are very sensitive to where they are. In fact, most of the devices have a GPS in them, so they know where they are. They want to do frequency planning and not interfere with their macro-cells. But if you want five bars of service in your house or office, they’re great. The carriers will work with you.

VB: I asked you last year about the ingredients for the Internet of Things, what a chip company might need to have. Are some of those things coming in?

McGregor: To have the Internet of Things, you need the ability to integrate everything into a single device, so you can get low cost and low power in a small form factor. Those are critical. You look at a lot of these devices, like a watch or something you want to wear, you want it to be very small. Physically you don’t want it to be very big and awkward.

You want low power so the battery can be small. We’ve put together technologies that include processors, memory, all the connectivity pieces — whether it’s Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or NFC — and power management in the device. You need all the sensor integration as well. We do all of that in a single device that we think brings a very effective power solution.

VB: How does the competition look on that front now?

McGregor: I think the competition is fairly fragmented. There aren’t many companies that have all those technologies, and even if they do, they may not be able to put them in one device. Broadcom is unusual in that regard. We’re able to create these integrated devices. Most of the others have a multi-chip solution, which we feel is just not as competitive from a cost and power and form factor point of view.

VB: How is the whole maker hardware movement coming along? WICED was associated with that. Is that starting to catch on?

McGregor: WICED is going really well. We have an awful lot of customers developing on that now. We don’t announce customers until they ship, but there’s quite a following. Some people use the WICED development kits and some use our technology more directly, but we’re in most of the watches that are out there. We’re in quite a few devices. Broadcom has a great opportunity in the Internet of Things.

Above: Broadcom smart home devices

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi