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Atheros Communications

Type	Public (NASDAQ: ATHR)
Founded	May 1998
Headquarters	Santa Clara, California, USA
Key people	Teresa H. Meng, founder and director Craig H. Barratt, President and CEO
Industry	Semiconductors
Products	Network cards
Employees	1079[1]
Website	www.atheros.com

Atheros Communications (NASDAQ: ATHR) is a developer of semiconductors for network communications, particularly wireless chipsets. Founded in 1998 by experts in signal processing from Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley and the private industry, it became a public company in 2004. The current President and CEO of the company is Craig H. Barratt.

Atheros chipsets for the IEEE 802.11 standard of wireless networking are used by over 30 different wireless device manufacturers, including Netgear, D-Link and TRENDnet.^[2]

Free software support

History

In the free software community, Atheros has been known for not releasing appropriate documentation that would allow free software developers to write open-source drivers to support their wireless devices without reverse-engineering,^[3] thus OSS support for Atheros hardware was rather limited. There are still some completely free open-source drivers written via reverse-engineering techniques. For example, Reyk Floeter of the OpenBSD project has reversed-engineered the HAL-module of the ath driver found on FreeBSD, and provided a completely free driver to Atheros devices. Also Nick Kossifidis of the MadWiFi project based on Floeter's work started madwifi-old-openhal branch on feb. 2006 ^[4] in order to create a free driver for Linux. Kossifidis did some further reverse engineering (added support for most ar5k chips) and various code improvements and his code made it to ath5k ^[5], a driver for Atheros chips now included in the Linux kernel.

Atheros has often been featured in OpenBSD's theme songs that relate to the ongoing efforts of freeing non-free devices. ^[6]

Current situation

In July 2008 Atheros decided to change policy and hired two key Linux wireless developers Luis Rodriguez and Jouni Malinen and released an open source Linux driver for their 802.11n devices.^[7]. Atheros also released some source from their binary HAL under ISC license to help community add support for their abg chips, it can be downloaded from http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/mcgrof/legacy-hal.tar.bz2.

Acquisitions

In late 2007, Atheros acquired u-Nav, a GPS chipmaker, indicating that the company was interested in getting into the GPS market.^[8]

In late 2009, Atheros acquired Intellon.^[9]With this acquisition, Atheros enhanced its networking technology portfolio to include Intellon’s industry-leading Power line communication (PLC) solutions for home networking, networked entertainment, broadband-over-powerline (BPL) access, Ethernet-over-Coax (EoC) and smart grid management applications.

References

External links

• Atheros homepage
• Atheros support in Linux
• Atheros Linux and FreeBSD binary-only HAL drivers released, Atheros press release, 23 July 2003