Atheros
More info
- Creator
- Teresa Meng, John Hennessy
- Released
- 1998–2011
- Type
- Semiconductor company
- Successor
- Qualcomm Atheros
A Stanford spin-off whose Wi-Fi chips ended up in a large share of the world's routers and became the Linux crowd's favourite wireless silicon.
Teresa Meng and John Hennessy founded the company in 1998 and showed that 5 GHz radios could be built in ordinary CMOS rather than pricier specialist processes. Its first 802.11a chipset arrived around the turn of the millennium, and cheap CMOS radio soon became the industry norm. Qualcomm bought Atheros in 2011 for $3.1 billion and kept the name as Qualcomm Atheros.
For Linux users, Atheros was long the safe bet. The early MadWifi driver depended on a binary blob, but in 2008 the company itself contributed the fully open ath9k. That made Atheros chips the default choice for OpenWrt, mesh networks and anything else where you need to be able to read the firmware.