Atheros

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Atheros Communications

Type	Public (NASDAQ: ATHR)
Founded	May 1998
Headquarters	Santa Clara, California
Key people	Teresa H. Meng, founder and director Craig H. Barratt, President and CEO
Industry	Semiconductors
Products	Wireless LAN
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]

In late 2007, Atheros acquired u-Nav, a GPS chipmaker, indicating that the company was interested in getting into the GPS market.^[2]

[edit] Free software support

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In the free software 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,^[3] 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. ^[4]

On 23 July 2003, Atheros announced the release of an open-source driver for their 802.11b/g and 802.11a/b/g chipsets for Linux and FreeBSD.^[5]

As of September 2007, Atheros is working on providing a Linux driver for 802.11n and expects to release it soon under the GPL.^{[citation needed]}