Qualcomm Atheros is a developer of semiconductor chips for network communications, particularly wireless chipsets. The company was founded under the name T-Span Systems in 1998 by experts in signal processing and VLSI design from Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and private industry. The company was renamed Atheros Communications in 2000 and it completed an initial public offering in February 2004, trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol ATHR. On January 5, 2011, it was announced that Qualcomm had agreed to a takeover of the company for a valuation of US$3.7 billion. When the acquisition was completed on May 24, 2011, Atheros became a subsidiary of Qualcomm operating under the name Qualcomm Atheros. Qualcomm Atheros chipsets for the IEEE 802.11 standard of wireless networking are used by over 30 different wireless device manufacturers.

History

T-Span Systems was co-founded in 1998 by Teresa Meng, professor of engineering at Stanford University and John L. Hennessy, provost at the time and then president of Stanford University through 2016. The company's first office was a converted house on Encina Avenue, Palo Alto, adjacent to a car wash and Town & Country Village. In September 1999, the company moved to an office at 3145 Porter Drive, Building A, Palo Alto. In 2000, T-Span Systems was renamed Atheros Communications and the company moved to a larger office at 529 Almanor Avenue, Sunnyvale. Atheros publicly demonstrated its inaugural chipset, the world's first WLAN implemented in CMOS technology and the first high-speed 802.11a 5 GHz technology. In 2002, Atheros announced a dual-band wireless product, the AR5001X 802.11a/b. In 2002, Craig H. Barratt joined Atheros as vice president and in March 2003 became CEO. In 2003, the company shipped its 10-millionth wireless chip. In 2004, Atheros unveiled a number of products, including the first video chipset for mainstream HDTV-quality wireless connectivity. In 2004, Atheros disclosed its Super-G compression protocol to double the performance of 802.11/g. This was a major event in this history of the company and drove a great deal of sales and growth. In 2005, Atheros introduced the industry's first MIMO-enabled WLAN chip, as well as the ROCm family for mobile handsets and portable consumer electronics. In 2006, Atheros announced its XSPAN product line, which featured a single-chip, triple-radio for 802.11n. In this same year, they began to collaborate with Qualcomm on a product for CDMA and WCDMA-enabled handsets. In 2008, Atheros announced the Align 1-stream 802.11n product line for PCs and networking equipment. In 2010, Atheros shipped its 500-millionth WLAN chipset and 100-millionth Align 1-stream chipset. They released the first HomePlug AV chipset with a 500 Mbit/s PHY rate.

IPO

On February 12, 2004, Atheros completed its initial public offering on the NASDAQ exchange trading under the symbol ATHR. Shares opened at US$14 per share with 9 million offered. Prices on the first day ranged up to US$18.45 and closed at US$17.60 per share. At the time, Atheros had approximately 170 employees.

Acquisition by Qualcomm

In January 2011, Qualcomm agreed to acquire Atheros at $45 per share cash. This agreement was subject to shareholder regulatory approvals. In May 2011, Qualcomm completed its acquisition of Atheros Communications for a total of US$3.7 billion. Atheros became a subsidiary of Qualcomm under the name Qualcomm Atheros. After the acquisition, the division unveiled the WCN3660 Combo Chip, which integrated dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM into Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile processors. Qualcomm Atheros launched the Skifta media shifting application for Android and released the first HomePlug Green PHY at the end of the year. In 2012, Qualcomm Atheros announced a Wi-Fi display product at the Consumer Electronics Show 2012, along with a new chip for HomePlug AV power line networking. At Mobile World Congress 2012, Qualcomm Atheros demonstrated a suite of 802.11ac enabled products. This included the WCN3680, a mobile 802.11ac combo chip targeting smartphones and tablets. In June 2012 at Computex, Qualcomm Atheros added new 802.11ac products. In 2015, Qualcomm Atheros released the QCA9531 system-on chip (SoC), which is an 802.11n 2x2 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi SoC for WLAN platforms, with CPU clock speed up to 650 MHz, supporting DDR2 or DDR1 memory.

Products

Acquisitions

Free and open-source software support

Support for Atheros devices on Linux and FreeBSD once relied on the hobbyist project MadWifi, originally created by Sam Leffler and later supported by Greg Chesson. MadWifi later evolved into ath5k. In July 2008, Atheros released an open-source Linux driver called ath9k for their 802.11n devices. Atheros also released some source from their binary HAL under ISC license to add support for their abg chips. Atheros has since been actively contributing towards the ath9k driver in Linux. Atheros has also been providing documentation and assistance to the FreeBSD community to enable updated support for 802.11n chipsets in FreeBSD-9.0 and up. The flexibility and openness of ath9k makes it a prime candidate for experiments around improving Wi-Fi. It is the first subject of a FQ-CoDel-based radio fairness improvement experiment by Make-Wifi-Fast. The driver has also been modified by radio hobbyists to broadcast in licensed frequency bands. The article comparison of open-source wireless drivers lists free and open-source software drivers available for all Qualcomm Atheros IEEE 802.11 chipsets. The most recent generations of Atheros wireless cards (802.11ac and 802.11ax) require non-free binary blob firmware to work, whereas earlier generations generally do not require non-free firmware. Atheros was featured in OpenBSD's songs that relate to the ongoing efforts of freeing non-free devices.