Industry's First 802.11a WLAN Chipset Ships in Volume; Atheros 5-GHz Solution Launches New Era of High-Speed Wireless LAN Connectivity.

Business Editors and High Tech Writers

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 5, 2001

Atheros Communications is now shipping its industry-leading AR5000 chipset in volume to companies developing next-generation 5-GHz Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) products for enterprises, small/medium businesses, homes and public "hot spot" areas such as airports and hotels. Customers who have publicly announced their plans to develop AR5000-based products include Card Access, Intermec, Proxim, TDK and others. Atheros anticipates next-generation 802.11a WLAN products based on the Atheros AR5000 chipset will begin appearing this fall.

"As the world's first 5-GHz, 802.11a compliant chipset in volume production, the AR5000 will open the door to a wide variety of high-speed WLAN applications," said Rich Redelfs, president and chief executive officer of Atheros Communications. "We're excited that our key customers will soon be delivering products based on the AR5000 chipset. Those products will help establish IEEE 802.11a as the leading solution for next-generation wireless LAN connectivity."

Incorporating a complete "Radio-on-a-Chip" (RoC) and integrated MAC/baseband processor, the AR5000 is the world's first two-chip, all-CMOS, end-to-end solution for 802.11a 5GHz WLANs. The Atheros AR5000 solution delivers data rates up to 54 megabit per second (Mbps) compliant with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) 802.11a 5GHz wireless LAN standard, and can also provide speeds up to 72 Mbps in Atheros Turbo Mode(TM).

"When we first looked at Atheros' technology last year, we were impressed," said Craig Mathias, principal of Farpoint Group. "Now that 802.11a products are here, we think Atheros is well-positioned to take advantage of what will certainly be the next step in the evolution of the wireless LAN -- functional equivalence with wire."

Atheros also announced the availability of IEEE 802.11a wireless LAN access point and client card reference designs based on the AR5000 chipset. These reference designs will help OEMs get to market faster with cost-effective 802.11a wireless networking products that offer improved performance, energy efficiency and much greater system capacity.

AR5000 Technical Specifications

The Atheros AR5000 chipset leverages the company's expertise in wireless system design and IC integration. The two-chip AR5000 solution includes the AR5110 Radio-on-a-Chip (RoC) and AR5210 MAC/Baseband Processor. Together these devices comprise a complete, cost-effective, low-power silicon solution for next-generation 5-GHz WLAN designs.

Atheros has rearchitected the WLAN system to enable more efficient designs than were previously possible. The AR5000 architecture incorporates a high-performance DMA engine that extends the frontier in WLAN system speed and power efficiency. The architecture provides a MAC that is made both flexible and fast through a combination of hardware data operations and host-based software modules that can be configured to support new standards and technologies. By eliminating the general-purpose embedded processor and its associated memory, the AR5000 enables vendors to reduce the cost of WLAN designs.

The AR5000 chipset:

-- Supports all IEEE 802.11a mandatory and optional data rates up to 54 Mbps

-- Offers extended speeds up to 72 Mbps in Atheros Turbo Mode(TM)

-- Provides full 128-bit WEP encryption and support for Dynamic Key Exchange
without performance degradation

-- Includes Quality of Service (QoS) support for video distribution and other
multimedia applications

-- Uses mainstream, standard-process 0.25-micron digital CMOS technology

The AR5110 is an all-CMOS single-chip radio with integrated power amplifier and low-noise amplifier. The fully integrated single-chip transceiver eliminates the need for external voltage-controlled oscillators, surface acoustic wave (SAW) intermediate frequency filters and other costly board components. The transmitter combines baseband in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) signals, up-converts them to the desired 5GHz frequency channel, and drives the RF signal off-chip through the integrated power amplifier. The AR5110 operates in the 5.15 to 5.25 GHz indoor and 5.25 to 5.35 GHz indoor/outdoor U-NII frequency bands. The chip's frequency synthesizer supports the frequency channels defined by the IEEE 802.11a (USA) and MMAC (Japan) standards. The transceiver also supports Atheros Turbo Mode(TM), which increases the overall data rate to 72 Mbps by encoding pairs of channels into aggregated data streams.

The AR5210 MAC/Baseband Processor integrates media access control (MAC) logic, baseband processing functions, a PCI/MiniPCI/CardBus host interface, and analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters. It operates without external RAM or flash memory and implements an OFDM baseband processor supporting all IEEE 802.11a mandatory and optional data rates using Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK), Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK), 16 QAM and 64 QAM modulation schemes. Additional features include forward error correction coding, signal detection, automatic gain control, frequency offset estimation, symbol timing and channel estimation. The AR5210 also performs receive and transmit filtering, frame encryption/decryption, and error recovery operations as defined by the IEEE 802.11a standard.

Pricing and Availability

The AR5000 WLAN chipset is shipping in volume and is priced at under $35 in OEM quantities of 100,000 units. For more information on Atheros' products, contact [e-mail] or call us directly at 408-773-5294.

About Atheros Communications, Inc.

Atheros Communications was founded in May 1998 by leading experts in radio and signal processing from Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and private industry. The Company's mission is to provide wireless networking technologies that drive transparent connections between all computing, communications, audio and video devices. Funded by August Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Foundation Capital, New Enterprise Associates and others, Atheros has raised a total of $98.3 million in three rounds of funding. The Company currently employs 140 people and has filed more than 45 wireless technology patents. For more information, visit www.atheros.com or send email to [e-mail].

Atheros and the Atheros logo are trademarks of Atheros Communications, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.