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

Scott McGregor gets a heads-up on all of the new tech trends before they become obvious. That’s because he’s chief executive of Broadcom, the Irvine, Calif.-based maker of communications chips. Those chips are used in just about everything, from cable set-top boxes to the Internet of Things (or smart and connected everyday objects).

His favorite new gadget is the iGrill, a thermometer with a Bluetooth radio. It senses the temperature inside the meat you’re cooking, and then it sends the data to an app on your smartphone. McGregor can watch TV without burning whatever is in his oven. Tech companies like Broadcom are making the chips that serve as processor, sensors, and communications devices for the Internet of Things.

We caught up with McGregor at the 2015 International CES. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview with McGregor. (And here’s our interview with him from CES 2014).

Above: iGrill

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

VentureBeat: What are some of the tech trends that will drive 2015?

Scott McGregor: Two things at the show have struck me. One is that 4K is becoming real. We’ve been seeing demos for quite a while, but now the price of the devices is coming down. The content is becoming available. It’s becoming mainstream. When we talk with a lot of the carriers and cable operators and content providers, they are very focused on delivering 4K in the next year.

The Internet of Things is becoming more real. The number of devices has gone up tremendously in the last year. They’re becoming more interesting, more worth buying. We like that. The challenge will be to integrate them all into the different ecosystems we have.

VentureBeat: I see a lot of connected things I like, but when I put the price tag in front of them, I’m not so crazy about them. The Lamborghini smartphone at $6,000 doesn’t sound so good. An automated pet feeder at $250, that’s a tough one.

McGregor: It’s early days. We have to decide whether Bluetooth pet feeders are an interesting category. Once we do, we’ll see brands emerge and people will drive it and the prices will go down. Right now we’re still experimenting with categories in the IOT. We haven’t decided if we want pet feeders or activity trackers, which of those are going to succeed.

VB: Does it look like some things are already taking off?

McGregor: Some things have clear utility. I bought this thing the other day called iGrill, a Bluetooth thermometer for stuff you put on the grill. You can go inside and see the temperature while you’re on the sofa watching the game. I got it as a Christmas present and I actually use it. I’m very happy with it.

VB: Not burning as much food?

McGregor: I just get to watch the game now, you know? I can hang with my friends instead of constantly checking on the food. It calculates how fast it’s going and estimates when it’s going to be done.

VB: Is that a $2,000 device, though?

McGregor: No, it’s on Amazon for less than $100. It’s in the Christmas-present category. One of the other things that’s interesting at the show here is getting Internet into the house and around the house at high speeds. We have what’s called DOCSIS 3.1, which is a cable standard. It’ll take the cable performance for Internet up to more than a gigabit per second. That’s important. It’ll be competitive with fiber. A whole lot of people across the United States will be able to get super high speed Internet to their house.

We also announced the four-by-four and eight-by-eight MIMO for Wi-Fi. You can do as much as four gigabits per second in the house streaming data around. That’s interesting because as you move 4K movies and things like that, they’re big, but they’ll move quickly. Also, if you’re a gamer, you care about latency. These things are all much quicker. For people who are intensive users of the network, they’re going to like that.

Above: Internet of Things gadgets with Broadcom chips.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

VB: I had a Bluetooth fitness watch and iOS 8 on an iPhone 5S. The Bluetooth pairing didn’t work. I think it’s an iOS 8 problem? It wouldn’t pair in my car either, so I think the Bluetooth is the problem. I wonder if Bluetooth is really solid as a foundation for a lot of wearables.

McGregor: I think it is. I think Bluetooth low energy especially is a good technology. For short range, for wearables, which are generally tethered to a smartphone — the ones that are Broadcom-based have a pretty strong stack for all the pairing like that. That shouldn’t be a problem. It should work pretty well for most major smartphones and devices that use our technology.

VB: It seems that if there’s a delay in pairing, people won’t have the patience for that kind of thing. If it takes you 10 minutes to pair —

McGregor: 10 minutes is unreasonable, yeah. We have a number of other technologies that let you pair with NFC and other things to speed up the pairing and automate that. But generally it should be pretty quick to pair. That’s usually a software issue on the part of one of the devices.

VB: Otherwise it seems like we do have this foundation for a lot of things in place.

McGregor: For connectivity, the foundation is in place. It’s generally Bluetooth for wearables and wireless LAN for IOT.

VB: How is the WICED platform for connecting gadgets doing?

McGregor: It’s going well. There are a whole bunch of devices coming out now. We have wireless charging, which we think is really important — just for convenience, but also, as you make devices waterproof, it’s important to eliminate the micro-USB cables and things like that.

Above: Broadcom-based pill dispenser

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

VB: Is there something emerging here as a leader in terms of standards?

McGregor: We support all of them. We make it easy for customers. We have devices that support three different standards. That eliminates the concern.

We have a lot of location things for both wearable devices and phones. It’s nice to do location, but also in a very low-power way. One of the challenges you have with location is that if you take fixes off GPS satellites all the time, you run your battery out. We’ve integrated a sensor with the GPS, which means that you can use some of the inertial tracking and things like that to create a geo-fence. You don’t do any satellite fixes if you’re not moving. If you move beyond a certain distance, then you’ll do another fix.

We have 60 gigahertz technology, moving toward 802.11ad, for short-range and very high bandwidth. We have all kinds of things in terms of WICED and Bluetooth. The goal here is to create SOCs that contain connectivity and processing and memory and various forms of analog power management. All the pieces you need to create a complete wearable. We believe that the best performance on power and other things is to do a low-power device like that.

VB: I wonder if 60 gigahertz is what we’ll need for the Oculus to be wireless. The headsets are always wired now.

McGregor: I don’t think so. Wireless LAN will work fine for that. Wireless LAN and audio are very popular at the show here. The problem with 60 gigahertz is that it’s narrow, in a room. It doesn’t have a long range. Wireless LAN, you can move from room to room in the house. That’s better.

I don’t know if you’ve seen this, the Jamstick for playing music and connecting to things. This here is fun, the Lego cars that you can control. This is a pill dispenser, making sure people take their pills at the right time of day. We have a bunch more different devices in the wall there — scales, lightbulbs, all kinds of things. You’ve seen the smoke detectors and thermostats.

This is the new high-performance Wi-Fi. This is four-gig in the house. It’s very good for video and audio streaming, as well as gaming. That’ll be out later this year for the early adopters.

We don’t have the time to go through the whole demo of the smart home, but the way it works is that you start over there watching stuff on TV. Then we push the doorbell and it tells you somebody has arrived at the door. It’ll put the camera view on your TV. We have kitchen appliances over here, all kinds of home things. If you put a TV show over there, it’ll remember that it’s you, and when you walk to another room, it’ll sense from your phone that you’ve entered the room and move the TV show with you.

What’s key for us is the whole gateway and methodology tying it all together. We have all these different devices integrated together. What he’s demonstrating over there is that you often want to integrate an alarm system the customer might already have. We’ve created an emulated keypad that will work an old-fashioned alarm system tied to your modern house. When you say “Lock down the house,” it’ll arm the alarm and do all that other stuff.

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