Qualcomm Atheros
| File:Atheros.png | |
| Company type | Public (Nasdaq: ATHR) |
|---|---|
| Industry | Semiconductors |
| Founded | May 1998 |
| Headquarters | Santa Clara, California |
Key people | Teresa H. Meng, founder and director Craig H. Barratt, President and CEO |
| Products | Wireless LAN |
Number of employees | 340 (October 2005) |
| Website | www.atheros.com |
Atheros Communications (Nasdaq: ATHR) is a developer of semiconductors for wireless communications. 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 Linksys. [1]
All Apple Intel Computers come with Atheros wi-fi adapters.
Atheros vs. Free software
 | This article needs to be updated. |
In the open-source community, Atheros is 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[2], thus OSS support for Atheros hardware is rather limited. Although documentation is not available, 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 driver, and provided a completely free driver to Atheros devices.
Atheros is often featured in OpenBSD's themed songs that relate to the ongoing efforts of freeing non-free devices. [3]
Added comment (Sept '07): Atheros is working on providing a Linux driver for 802.11n and will release it GPL (rsn).
External links
- Atheros homepage
- Atheros support in Linux
- Atheros Linux and FreeBSD binary-only HAL drivers released, Atheros press release, 23 July 2003]
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