The Company was founded in May 1998 and its initial round of financing, led by August Capital and Foundation Capital, secured approximately $6 million in funding. The investment was used for research on how to apply state-of-the-art design methodologies developed at Stanford to wireless LANs in order to deliver a 10-times improvement in price/performance over today's technologies. Dr.Meng, chief technology officer of Atheros, is a world-renowned expert in data communications and low-power design. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and has taken a multiyear leave of absence from the electrical engineering department at Stanford to found Atheros.

"The Company's core competency lies in our technical expertise," stated Dr. Hennessy. "With an impressive team and over 20 patents filed, we have engineered a truly revolutionary technology based on re-architecting how a radio works to dramatically improve the performance and significantly reduce the cost and power."

Richard A. Redelfs joined Atheros as president and CEO in October 1999. Mr. Redelfs spent his previous 10 years with 3Com Corporation, most recently as vice president and general manager of the Wireless and Home Connectivity Division.

"Not long ago, car phones required a big box in the trunk and were only for the wealthy," said Mr. Redelfs. "Now, every teenager sports a pocket-sized mobile phone. By driving down cost and increasing reliability and performance, our goal is to make wireless networking at home, in the office or at school even more ubiquitous than the mobile phone."

Enabling the Wireless Future

Wireless is the most flexible and convenient communications media to connect office or consumer electronics. Atheros' vision is to enable the wireless future by providing transparent connectivity among all computing, voice, audio, video and Internet access devices on an enterprise LAN, in the small office or at home. To achieve this vision of ubiquitous, interoperable wireless connectivity between many different classes of devices, Atheros seeks to provide low-cost, high-bandwidth, low-power technology based on industry standards. The Company is initially focused on developing chipsets based on the IEEE 802.11a and HiperLAN II standards, but is also proposing standards enhancements for the future. Atheros' proposed enhancements will enable higher bandwidth, support multimedia, and allow interoperable scalability between low-speed and high-speed devices. (See separate release.)

The Atheros corporate Board of Directors includes Dr. Hennessy, chairman, as well as Dr. Meng and Mr. Redelfs. Also on the Board are Andy Rappaport from August Capital, Bill Elmore from Foundation Capital and Forest Baskett from New Enterprise Associates. In March of this year, the Company completed an oversubscribed Series B funding round, raising an additional $25.3 million. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates, with August Capital and Foundation Capital participating.

Atheros Communications Advisors

• Phil Belanger - vice president of Wireless Business Development for Wayport and chairman of the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA); formerly vice president of Marketing for Aironet (now a part of Cisco)
• Dr. Bob Brodersen - professor, University of California at Berkeley; Berkeley Wireless Center founder (40 M.S./Ph.D.wireless researchers)
• Adam Grosser - president, Subscriber Networks, Excite@Home
• Harvey C. Jones, Jr. - chairman, Tensilica; former chairman, CEO and founder of Synopsys and Daisy Systems
• Dr. Simon Wong - professor of electrical engineering, Stanford University; formerly with National Semiconductor and Hewlett-Packard; authority on fabrication and design of high-performance integrated systems
• Dr. Bruce Wooley - chairman of electrical engineering department, Stanford University; formerly with Bell Labs; world-expert on analog circuit design

Founded in 1995, August Capital is a leading venture capital firm actively investing in entrepreneurial teams throughout the information technology market spectrum. With more than 50 years of combined venture capital experience and dozens of successful IPOs and public company board relationships, August Capital partners have financed technology companies with an aggregate market capitalization of more than one-half trillion dollars. www.augustcap.com

About Foundation Capital

Founded in 1995, Foundation Capital is a premier venture capital firm committed to providing exceptional service to entrepreneurs to help build great new companies. In addition to capital, Foundation invests effort, perspective and experience in business to business e-commerce, Internet infrastructure, and telecommunications and networking start-ups. The firm takes a hands-on approach, partnering with companies in their formative stages and helping them gain access to industry leaders, potential customers, prospective partners, world-class board members and candidates for key management positions. www.foundationcapital.com

About New Enterprise Associates

New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is one of the industry's premier venture capital firms investing primarily in information technology and medical and life sciences companies. Founded in 1978, NEA's portfolio investments range in their development from seed and early-stage to later-stage and more mature investments. NEA typically plays an active role in its investments and assists company management with building companies of lasting value. NEA currently has $2.5 billion under management and has invested in over 475 companies, of which more than 125 have gone public and more than 115 have been successfully acquired. www.nea.com

For press and analyst inquiries contact: Cheryl Patstone, 408-773-5344, cheryl@atheros.com or Greg Wood, A&R Partners, 650-762-2838, gwood@arpartners.com.