Philips Chip Chief to Take Over at Broadcom

Broadcom Corp. on Tuesday announced that Scott McGregor, chief of Philips chip division, will become its new president and CEO.

McGregor will continue in his current position at Philips through the rest of this year, according to a Broadcom spokesperson, and then assume the title of Broadcoms chief executive on Jan. 3. He will replace Broadcom President and CEO Alan “Lanny” Ross, who will retire.

McGregor announced his his departure from Philips last month, where he had led the semiconductor division of Royal Philips Electronics NV, based in Eindhoven, Netherlands, for the last three years. McGregor was traveling in Europe and unavailable for an interview, Broadcom spokesperson Bill Blanning said from the companys Irvine, Calif., headquarters.

McGregor takes over for Ross at a key juncture in Broadcoms history, as Wi-Fi moves from a novel idea and a premium product into a commodity infrastructure. Taiwan chip vendors have entered the market with their own designs and helped push Broadcom into developing chip sets that combine both voice and Wi-Fi as a means of transmitting both voice and data through handsets.

Meanwhile, its chip set division, once a stable source of revenue for the company, is fading as Intel Corp. reintroduces its own enterprise chip sets for machines with eight processors and above. Broadcom is also pushing further into traditional cellular chip sets as well as short-range personal networks, such as Bluetooth, in addition to its stable Ethernet business in the enterprise space.

“The chance to join Broadcom in January as chief executive at this stage in its growth and development is the opportunity of a lifetime,” McGregor said in a statement. “Broadcom has built a solid global reputation as a technology and product leader in many wired and wireless communications markets, with a record of consistently superior execution by some of the best engineering talent in the industry. I am looking forward to leading this dynamic team in the future as Broadcom addresses tremendous potential opportunities.”

McGregor joined the Philips Semiconductors group in February 1998 as head of its Emerging Business unit before being named president and CEO of Philips Semiconductors in September 2001. He previously worked both at Xerox PARC and at Microsoft Corp., where he helped design the original Microsoft Windows software.

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