Walking through the new, 45-acre Irvine campus that Broadcom Corp. calls home, it’s hard to peg a defining architectural style.
Thomas Porter, vice president of corporate facilities who oversaw the two-year construction project and this month’s move, sums it up with a phrase unlikely to be found in Architectural Digest.
“We’re engineers,” he said. “We like squares.”
Square buildings are what Broadcom has at University Research Park, eight of them to be exact. Four of them were full last week when the first wave of 835 local workers, mostly engineers, moved into offices and laboratories.
By the end of the month, the final wave of 1,000 people, including executives and support staff, will take over the four remaining buildings that still are being finished.
Painters, tile layers and movers still were shaping up the final four buildings on a recent tour.
Broadcom isn’t saying how much was spent on construction and relocation. The 685,000-square-foot campus is the largest of a handful being built or recently completed in the county.
The new headquarters is part of a larger change playing out at Broadcom.
The chipmaker is looking to get past a $2.2 billion bill for misdated options that has federal prosecutors “strongly considering” criminal charges against former chief financial officer Bill Ruehle and one other executive, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The options scandal is rooted in Broadcom’s wilder, younger days under cofounder and former chief executive Henry “Nick” Nicholas, who left in 2003.
For that matter, so was the company’s old headquarters in the Irvine Spectrum, with its gym and cafeteria where even chefs were rich, thanks to the company’s 1998 initial public stock offering and tech boom run-up.
The new campus also has a cafeteria and gym, but seems to reflect more the style of cofounder and chairman Henry Samueli and current Chief Executive Scott McGregor, a former Philips Semiconductors executive who’s moving Broadcom beyond its adolescence.
The campus has office space, labs and conference rooms.
Tech Palace
The number of construction materials are telling: 5,184 networking ports, 2,200 phone lines, 233 wireless networking access points and enough copper wire to stretch from Irvine to Reno.
Lab space alone accounts for nearly 80,000 square feet. Offices and scores of conference rooms are modular with modular furniture. In a matter of a couple of hours, an entire wing can be torn down and reconfigured.
“One of the things we do here is we move around a lot,” Porter said.
The Irvine Company developed the campus for Broadcom.
Originally, the Irvine Co. planned to put up buildings as part of an expansion of Univer-sity Research Park, which is owned with the University of California, Irvine.
But when Broadcom came looking for a place to call home, a deal was struck to reconfigure some of the grounds surrounding the buildings to give them a more uniform feel.
The buildings are connected by sidewalks and gardens, separated by a basketball court, sand volleyball court and a lawn where employee gatherings can be held.
The past five months have been spent getting the inside ready.
“We spent a lot of money on functionality, so it’s very much function over form,” Porter said.
Office doors slide open and shut, saving space. Motion sensors turn lights on and off. Ten-foot ceilings open up the interior hallways. Windows at the top of doorways allow daylight to stream in through the offices.
Security gates are at the front of each building entrance, requiring an electronic key card to gain entry. Once inside, workers can freely move about. Engineers are able to go from an upstairs office to a downstairs lab without having to fumble for an access card, Porter said.
Labs are at the core of most of the buildings. Each is about 50% larger than Broadcom’s labs in the Irvine Spectrum.
Cafeteria Convergence
Each building has a snack bar. But Porter said the company hopes to steer workers to the central cafeteria, which houses up to 500 people.
“We want to push people together so that ideas are exchanged,” Porter said. “There’s a lot of business that gets done in the cafe.”
With the arrival of the remaining workers, Broadcom finally will have everyone together. Two different sites had been used before.
“We spend a lot of time in the car getting back and forth,” Porter said. “It doesn’t matter where a meeting is, it’s always in the building we’re not. So we’re really looking forward to the benefit of getting together; we get so much productivity by having people together.”
The campus has room for growth.
“We signed the deal at the end of 2004, and at that time we thought the place was huge,” Porter said. Broadcom has rights to several other buildings in the park if it needs them.
“The one thing we look for in all of our places around the world is how we go the next step,” Porter said.
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Campus Derby
Broadcom Corp. isn’t alone.
Kia Motors America Inc. recently finished its Irvine campus, while Los Angeles-based mutual fund operator Capital Group Cos. is wrapping up its in the Irvine Spectrum.
The Irvine campus of South Korean automaker Kia is off the Santa Ana (I-5) Freeway near Jamboree Road. It’s a 22-acre site with a nod to traditional Korean architecture. The building features a 10,000-square-foot lobby with 45-foot ceilings and a glass gate. Wood and other building materials were imported specially for the $70 million project.
The grounds also feature a massive reflecting pond, cafe and gym.
Workers began moving into the building in January. It’ll be fully occupied by early fall, spokesman Alex Fedorak said.
Capital Group’s complex is due for move-in over Labor Day weekend, according to Brian Lewis, vice president of corporate facilities.
“We’ll move in with 2,000-plus associates,” he said.
Most are moving from Capital Group’s buildings in Brea and an Irvine site.
“The capacity of the campus is over 3,000 people, so we have an opportunity to hire a great number of associates in the future,” Lewis said.
The 640,000-square-foot campus includes a parking garage and “as much green space as possible,” Lewis said.
“It’s an environmental consideration for our folks. We think that landscape is more of an amenity than asphalt,” Lewis said.
,Dan Anderson
