Charges of fraud and conspiracy in the Broadcom stock-option backdating case have been dropped against two company executives. Due to misconduct on the side of the prosecution, the U.S. District Court threw out the charges. In the same breath the Security and Exchange Commission's civil case was also thown out against the four original executives being charged: former Chairman and CTO Henry Samueli, former general counsel David Dull--who both took leaves of absence from their positions--former CEO Henry Nicholas, and former CFO William Ruehle. Last week, the judge also dismissed Samueli's guilty plea to the charge of lying investigators and dropped the felony charges determining that Samueli was vague and evasive but did not lie.

The court found that prosecuters attempted to prevent three defense witnesses from testifying through intimidation and leaks to the media. The improper conduct was described as making "a mockery of the constitutional right to due process and a fair trial" by the judge who claimed that the actions of the lawyers had prevented the essential fact finding of the trial.

Broadcom--a supplier of IP phone chips to many of the world's VoIP equipement manufacturers including: Alcatel, Avaya, Nortel, NEC, Inter-tel, and Toshiba--fell victim to the stock-option backdating scandal in 2008 when the SEC charged four Broadcom executives with backdating then covering it up the between 1998 and 2003. In the summer of 2006 the company admitted it would need to re-state earnings for several years because of a series of suspect options transactions. Broadcom took a $2.2 billion charge against earnings.

For more:
- read the New York Times article
- read this LA Times story

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Broadcom offers open source HD Voice

Broadcom announced that it is offering its BroadVoice family of voice codecs royalty-free and without any licensing fees.

“As a direct response to customer demand for advanced, high-quality voice solutions and development tools”, Broadcom is releasing its wideband and narrowband BroadVoice codecs in both floating-point and fixed-point C code as open source software under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), version 2.1, as published by the Free Software Foundation.

Broadcom announced that it will offer BroadVoice codecs open source in order to lower the price of HD voice and encourage the technology's growth.

The BroadVoice codecs come in two varieties: BroadVoice32 and BroadVoice16 for wideband and narrowband telephony respectively. The company is releasing the C source code under the LGPL license from the Free Software Foundation. In eliminating the royalties and licensing fees from BroadVoice, Broadcom hopes to push for a cost effective transition for users to HD VoIP applications.

While making high quality calling cheaper is admirable, GigaOm is a little skeptical that it will be a game-changing feature. They point out that consumers have placed more focus on mobility and cost over quality in recent pushes for lesser-quality VoIP and cell phones.

For more:
- read the GigaOM article

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Broadcom intros new VoIP chipset
Broadcom announces high-density VoIP DSP

This morning Broadcom rolled out a new VoIP chip set for use in the next wave of IP phones and media phones. The Persona IP Communications platform, which includes HD audio codecs, comes just in time to support the new wave of media phones hitting the consumer and enterprise markets.

Persona is ready for OEMs to build IP phones and multimedia devices with low power consumption, tight security, and Gigabit Ethernet capability for the enterprise. The family includes two chips (BCM11107 and BCM11109) to support Gigabit applications and another one for what the company terms "value-line" and low-end enterprise SMB, and SOHO apps.

Each Persona device includes either a Gigabit or Fast Ethernet switch with packet filtering capabilities to support high-speed networks, the aforementioned super-wideband capable audio codecs, and applications and DSP processors to support Broadcom's PhonexChange IP phone software suite.

According to Broadcom, the Persona platform needs 30 percent less power than competing solutions and also is more green because it uses packaging material free of lead and "certain other toxins."

For more:
- Broadcom press release.

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