Prism (chipset)
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The Prism brand is used for wireless networking integrated circuit (commonly called "chips") technology from Conexant for wireless LANs.[1][2] They were formerly[when?] produced by Intersil Corporation,[1][2] before being sold to GlobespanVirata in 2003,[2][3][4] which was later acquired by Conexant in early 2004.[1][2][3]
Legacy 802.11b products (Prism 2/2.5/3)
The open-source HostAP driver supports the IEEE 802.11b Prism 2/2.5/3 family of chips.[5][6]
Wireless adaptors which use the Prism chipset are known for compatibility, and are preferred for specialist applications such as packet capture.
No win64 drivers are known to exist.[citation needed]
Intersil firmware
- WEP[7]
- WPA (TKIP), after update[8]
- WPA2 (CCMP), after update[citation needed]
- Access Point mode[9][6]
Lucent/Agere
- WEP[citation needed]
- WPA (TKIP in hardware)[citation needed]
802.11b/g products (Prism54, ISL38xx)
The chipset has undergone a major redesign for 802.11g compatibility and cost reduction, and newer "Prism54" chipsets are not compatible with their predecessors.[2]
Intersil initially provided a Linux driver for the first Prism54 chips which implemented a large part of the 802.11 stack in the firmware. However, further cost reductions caused a new, lighter firmware to be designed and the amount of on-chip memory to shrink, making it impossible to run the older version of the firmware on the latest chips.[citation needed] In the meantime, the PRISM business was sold to Conexant,[3] which never published or provided information about the newer firmware API that would enable a Linux driver to be written.[2]
A lack of SoftMAC support in the Prime54 driver resulted in only being able to use FullMAC devices.[10][2] However, a reverse engineering effort eventually made it possible to use the newer Prism54 chipsets under the Linux and BSD operating systems.[2] This effort deprecated the Prism54 driver in the Linux kernel, and has been replaced by the p54 driver which supports both FullMAC and SoftMAC.[10]
See also
- HostAP driver for prism chipsets
External links
- PRISM solutions at Conexant
- GPL drivers and firmware for the ISL38xx-based Prism chipsets (mostly reverse engineered)