- Atheros
Infobox Company
company_name = Atheros Communications
company_
company_type = Public (nasdaq|ATHR)
foundation = May 1998
location =Santa Clara, California
key_people = Teresa H. Meng, founder and director Craig H. Barratt, President and CEO
industry =Semiconductor s
products =Wireless LAN
revenue =
num_employees = 340 (October 2005)
homepage = [http://www.atheros.com www.atheros.com]Atheros Communications (nasdaq|ATHR) is a developer of
semiconductor s forwireless communications. Founded in 1998 by experts insignal processing fromStanford University , theUniversity of California, Berkeley and the private industry, it became apublic 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, includingNetgear ,D-Link andLinksys . [ [http://www.super-g.com/superproducts.html Companies that use Atheros wifi chpis] ]In late 2007, Atheros acquired u-Nav, a GPS chipmaker, indicating that the company was interested in getting into the GPS market. [ [http://wireless.itworld.com/4260/atheros-to-acquire-gps-chip-maker-u-nav-071214/page_1.html Atheros to acquire GPS chip maker u-Nav] ]
Free software support
In the
free software community , Atheros has been known for not releasing appropriate documentation that would allowfree software developers to write open-source drivers to support their wireless devices without reverse-engineering, [ [http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/03/01/1109546842718.html OpenBSD to support more wireless chipsets] ] 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 theOpenBSD 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 theMadWiFi project based on Floeter's work started madwifi-old-openhal branch on feb. 2006 [ [http://madwifi.org/wiki/About/OpenHAL OpenHAL] ] 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 [ [http://madwifi.org/wiki/About/ath5k About ath5k] ] , a driver for Atheros chips now included on the Linux kernel.Atheros has often been featured in OpenBSD's theme songs that relate to the ongoing efforts of freeing non-free devices. [ [http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#37 OpenBSD release song lyrics] ]
Recently, Atheros decided to change policy and released an open source Linux driver for their
802.11n devices. [ [http://madwifi.org/wiki/news/20080725/ath9k-atheros-unveils-free-linux-driver-for Atheros unveils free Linux driver for its 802.11n devices] ] . 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.References
External links
* [http://www.atheros.com Atheros homepage]
* [http://madwifi.org/wiki/Compatibility Atheros support in Linux]
* [http://www.atheros.com/news/linux.html Atheros Linux and FreeBSD binary-only HAL drivers released] , Atheros press release,23 July 2003
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