Biography|Hock Tan — The Buyout Shop on Trimble Road That Became His Life's Work

People treat Broadcom as a Palo Alto name that was always called Broadcom.

The company Tan was hired to run in March 2006 still answered to Avago, and its American office sat on West Trimble Road in San Jose.

Avago was the Semiconductor Products Group of Agilent, itself the 1999 Hewlett-Packard instrument and chip split. In December 2005 Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Silver Lake bought that group for about 2.66 billion dollars and folded it into a Singapore company.

Tan had just spent six years as chief executive of Integrated Circuit Systems, a timing-chip house headquartered in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Silver Lake hired him off that record.

SEC filings from 2006 list the U.S. headquarters at 350 West Trimble Road, San Jose, California 95131, with the registered office at 1 Yishun Avenue 7 in Singapore.

This pin is the San Jose address, not the later Palo Alto Hillview campus and not a private house.

From this office he ran a roll-up that the market would later know by another name. LSI came in 2014 for 6.6 billion dollars. Broadcom Corporation of Irvine came in a deal announced in May 2015 and closed on 1 February 2016 for 37 billion dollars.

The combined firm kept the Broadcom name and the Avago ticker, AVGO.

The Trimble building is a corporate campus, not a museum. The moment that belongs here is the month a private-equity chip shop chose a Malaysian-born finance engineer as its chief executive.

Photo: Greg Bezat, d/b/a Bezat Video Group, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Official 2022 Broadcom headshot of Hock Tan.