The story
Founded by Teresa H. Meng on May 1998.1
T-Span Systems, Inc. was co-founded in 1998 by Teresa Meng, professor of engineering at Stanford University and John L. Hennessy, provost at the time and subsequently president of Stanford University.
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.
Read the full text
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, it 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 $14 per share with 9 million offered. Prices on the first day ranged up to $18.45 and closed at $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.
From Wikipedia’s article on Atheros, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4