Broadcom's documentation sucked and will continue to suck because of their customer strategy. As a company their goal has always been to focus on high volume customers. I don't have a problem with that, except that they were also trying to cross-sell to the lower volume market but didn't have the mindset to support that market. Mind you this isn't just the Hobby market like RaspberryPi but smaller customers who were willing to pay. By smaller I mean companies who would buy 100,000 a year but not 1 Million+ a year. So it's not small change. Yet Broadcom just didn't have the support infrastructure or interest in supporting such customers while they develop products.<p>Just to see an scant datasheet for their old BLE chip one needed to the following.<p>1. Contact a Broadcom Sales rep. Ask if they are willing to sell to you.
2. Sales Rep then comes to your office with a PPT and makes a presentation clearly aimed at Management. Sales rep tries to understand your business and volume. If you pass a magic test, then you are now qualified to buy their product.
3. Sales Rep then asks who in your team will work on BLE. Takes their email addresses, phone numbers.
4. Sales Rep enables doc access. The team member gets an email and then can access datasheet for exactly that one single part. Plus that datasheet is watermarked that it's to be read by only that specific team member.<p>And no, this isn't 1995. Plus, if you want to change parts or explore a different part, you can't. Before Cypress bought BRCM's IoT business, if you had a problem with anything, the standard answer was - use WICED. BRCM's docs sucked so bad that they even hid information about UART and I2C. Think about it for a moment. Imagine buying a chip and you don't get programming information about UART and I2C. Instead you have to believe that WICED magically solves every problem.<p>Cypress buying and opening up BRCM's documentation is the best thing that's happened to documenting those parts and supporting customers who are small, medium volume.
For people not familiar with the industry or the issue, compare the documentation available for the broadcom processor in the popular raspberry pi 2<p><a href="https://github.com/raspberrypi/documentation/tree/master/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2836" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/raspberrypi/documentation/tree/master/har...</a><p>and that of the Allwinner A64 in the far less common "Banana Pi":<p><a href="https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO/tree/master/HARDWARE/A64-OLinuXino/PDF" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO/tree/master/HARDWARE/A64...</a><p>As you can see, the Broadcom documentation is non-existent, with the exception of a tiny document created by a third party.
I'm not familiar with this particular industry, but will the open-source Broadcom drivers in the Linux kernel benefit from this?<p>Because well ... Broadcom drivers <i>suck</i>.
As someone who recently, despite my better judgement, dropped a non-negligible amount of money on a 802.11ac adapter bearing a Broadcom chipset, I will readily say that I will never buy another of their wireless products again. I had assumed that their increased activity on the `brcm[fs]mac` drivers signaled a possible improvement in their efforts on Linux driver support.<p>Well, this may or may not be true, but the best drivers in the world won't do a thing if the vendor forgets to release compatible firmware. That's not to say that the firmware doesn't exist: if you are willing to strip an image out of an access point firmware image then you can bring the card into a somewhat functional state, but, as expected, it's far from perfect. Namely, WPA rekeying appears to be broken, rendering the device useless for my application.<p>I've been in contact with the vendor; the most precise release date for the firmware I've been able to get is (paraphrasing) "maybe someday".<p>Life is too short for this vendor's games.
The title is misleading - Cypress only acquired BroadCom's Internet of Things business, and it happened last April.<p><a href="http://www.cypress.com/news/cypress-acquire-broadcom-s-wireless-internet-things-business-0" rel="nofollow">http://www.cypress.com/news/cypress-acquire-broadcom-s-wirel...</a><p>"<i>Under the terms of the deal, Broadcom will continue to focus on its wireless connectivity solutions for the access and mobility segments that are not IoT related, including serving set-top box, wireless access, smartphone, laptop and notebook customers. Cypress will capitalize on the rapidly growing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity (17% per year) markets in consumer, industrial and automotive IoT segments.</i>"