Broadcom tops US$2 billion in March quarter

Broadcom reckons its exit from the cellular baseband modem business was a win, with better cashflow and more money handy to invest in its core business.

At the company's latest analyst session, chair and CTO Henry Samueli said that the exit had also given Broadcom the chance to enter “adjacent markets”.

The company narrowly beat analyst expectations of a US$2.01 billion for the quarter ending March 2015, recording US$2.06 billion.

President and CEO Scott McGregor identified the broadband access and high-end smartphone markets as driving the growth.

It's now expecting a 2014-15 full-year in the vicinity of US$8 billion, with a full-year profit better than US$2 billion.

The emerging white-box switch segment is helping things along (since it drives a conversion from ASICs to merchant silicon), as is the booming data centre market, faster Ethernet standards, and service provider IP migration in the LTE era.

While its broadband and connectivity segment remains the main chunk of its business at 66 per cent, growth in the infrastructure and networking business to 30 per cent has offset the exit from the cellular baseband modem business.

That infrastructure segment happens to be the target of the outfit's latest device launch, the StrataXGS Trident-II+ Ethernet switch series.

Now in sampling, the SoC targets the coming move beyond gigabit Ethernet in the data centre, with support for eight 100 Gbps Ethernet ports or 100 x 10 Gbps ports.

The HiGig2 interconnect protocol will let the chip be built into multi-terabit chassis designs, the company says, with the Trident-II+ targeting the burgeoning top-of-rack market. ®