Atheros Communications

» see atheros.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

There is a particular way of knowing a company that only applies to component makers. You never buy anything from them and you never see a logo, and then one evening a laptop will not connect, you go looking in a settings panel, and there it is: a string of characters that has been quietly describing a piece of your machine for three years. Atheros was that string for an enormous number of people, usually in the form of a part number like AR5007 or a driver called ath9k. The company behind it was incorporated in Delaware in May 1998 and commenced operations that December, under the name T-Span Systems Corporation.

The founders were Teresa Meng, a professor of engineering at Stanford, and John L. Hennessy, at the time Stanford's provost and later its president. The first office was a converted house on Encina Avenue in Palo Alto next to a car wash. In September 1999 they moved to Porter Drive, and in May 2000 the company renamed itself Atheros Communications and moved again, to Almanor Avenue in Sunnyvale. The technical claim it was founded on was that wireless radios could be built in plain CMOS rather than in exotic semiconductor processes, which was not the industry consensus at the time. Atheros demonstrated the first WLAN chipset built that way, running 802.11a at 5 GHz.

The IPO came in February 2004, on NASDAQ, ticker ATHR, and the company closed that year with 260 full-time employees. Six years later the last annual report it ever filed showed net revenue of $926.8 million, up 71 percent in a single year, against 1,778 staff. The customer concentration note in that filing is the part worth keeping: Hon Hai Precision took 15 percent of revenue in 2010, and in 2009 Nintendo on its own was 13 percent. Every Wii that found a household network was making this company money.

Wi-Fi reached me late and from the wrong direction. TTNet had put broadband into the apartment by about 2006, and the wireless arrived folded inside whatever router came with the line, so Atheros was never something I evaluated or bought. Nobody chose Atheros. You found out you had one.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the house on encina avenue ~

Revenue roughly tripled across the back half of the company's life, from $301.7 million in 2006 to $926.8 million in 2010, and the shape of the climb is uneven: 2009 added only about 15 percent, in a year when the whole semiconductor industry had a bad one, and then 2010 put on 71 percent in twelve months. Headcount went the same way, 260 at the end of 2004 against 1,778 six years later, with a good part of it bought rather than hired. Intellon came in during 2009 and brought powerline communications; Opulan arrived in August 2010 with fiber access technology.

By the end the company was not really a Wi-Fi house any more. The 2010 revenue split put networking at $474.9 million against computing at $238.1 million, with consumer close behind, and the catalog had spread into Bluetooth and GPS alongside the powerline chips that were going into electricity meters.

~ forty-five dollars ~

On 5 January 2011 Qualcomm and Atheros announced a definitive agreement from San Diego and San Jose. The number everybody repeats for this deal is $3.7 billion, and it is not the figure the two companies published. Their own release says Qualcomm would purchase Atheros "for $45 per share in cash, representing an enterprise value of $3.1 billion." Craig Barratt, Atheros chief executive since March 2003, was to join Qualcomm as president of its networking and connectivity business.

The merger took effect on 24 May 2011. The completion filing is precise about the shape of it. A vehicle called T Merger Sub, Inc. merged into Atheros, which survived as a wholly owned Qualcomm subsidiary and changed its name to Qualcomm Atheros, Inc. on the same day. Every outstanding share other than the acquirer's converted into the right to receive $45.00 in cash. Barratt was the only member of the Atheros board who stayed on the board of the thing that replaced it. NASDAQ was notified the same day and the Form 15 went in on 3 June.

~ the name in the driver string ~

Qualcomm kept the compound name for several years and then stopped using it. Search qualcomm.com today and the word does not appear on the front page; the current Wi-Fi silicon sells under entirely different branding, and atheros.com resolves only to redirect you to the parent. The brand is finished at the marketing layer.

It is not finished everywhere. The Linux wireless driver is still called ath9k, its successors kept the prefix as ath10k and ath11k, and a laptop from the Qualcomm Atheros years still announces itself under that name in a device list. A chip company's name outlives its own marketing department by whatever the kernel maintainers decide. It stops existing when the last driver carrying it falls out of the tree, and that has not happened yet.

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