I know that a lot of documentation and support can be obtained from various Chinese sites, at least for MTK's phone SoCs. It's absolutely true that trying to approach them "through the front door" will not yield anything worthwhile, but the culture has found other means. If this one becomes popular, I expect the same to happen.
I start laughing when I saw the last sentence, in all my designs I tried to avoid Broadcom as much as possible. Same as Marvell, you don't get anything other than a two-page brief before you sign a NDA, and if you're not a volume player, you normally don't get a chance to even sign the NDA.
Marvell is getting slightly better with docs, but still light-year behind TI and Freescale, whose design docs are pretty much all publicly accessible.
Broadcom seems to be easing up a bit with their introduction of their WICED (pronounced Wicked) line of Bluetooth Smart and Wifi wireless modules.
- $20 dev board keyfob that connects to an iPhone our of the box.
- lots of firmware source code examples
- available iOS source code
- free compiler toolchain and USB programming
- open schematics and pcb files
- open forum: http://community.broadcom.com/
As a designer, I know it's easy to have a bad experience with a particular manufacturer and then avoid them like the plague in the future.
One time we designed in an Atmel TinyAVR into something, and as soon as we finished it went completely out-of-stock for 12 months.
We had to throw the boards and firmware away and start from scratch again using a PIC.
(We've never used another Atmel processor after that.)
But I try to remember that it's just a bias in my mind, and personal biases don't always jibe with reality.
Rationally, I understand that Atmel's not a bad company just because they had one supply chain glitch 7 years ago.
On the bright side, at least it's not Broadcom.