| Ralink Technology, Corp. | |
|---|---|
| Type | |
| Founded | January 2001 |
| Headquarters | Hsin-chu, Taiwan; Cupertino, CA |
| Industry | Semiconductor |
| Products | Wi-Fi chipset |
| Website | www.ralinktech.com |
Ralink Technology, Corp. is a Wi-Fi chipset manufacturer which claims to hold 12% of the World Wide WLAN chipset market. Now headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan, Ralink was founded in 2001 in Cupertino, California. Ralink's latest 802.11n RT2800 chipsets have been accepted into the Wi-Fi Alliance 802.11n draft 2.0 core technology testbed. They have also been previously selected in the Wi-Fi Protected Set Up (WPS) and Wireless Multimedia Extensions Power Save (WMM-PS) testbeds. Ralink is an active participant in the Wi-Fi Alliance and the IEEE 802.11 standards committees.[1] Ralink chipsets are used in various consumer-grade routers made by Gigabyte Technology, Linksys, D-Link and Belkin, as well as Wi-Fi adaptors for USB, PCI, ExpressCard, PC Cards and PCI Express interfaces. An example of an adapter is the Nintendo Wi-Fi USB Connector which uses the Ralink's RT2570 chipset to allow Nintendo DSs and Wiis to connect to the Internet via a home computer. Newer products such as the RT2501 and RT2600 have improved greatly over the previous RT2400 and RT2500 chipsets.
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Operating systems support
Ralink is one of the few Wi-Fi chipset manufacturers that provide documentation without a non-disclosure agreement.
Linux
Ralink provides GPL drivers for Linux. While Linux drivers for the older RT2500 chipsets are no longer updated by Ralink, these are now being maintained by Serialmonkey's rt2x00 project. Current Ralink chipsets require firmware. Ralink allows the use and redistribution of the firmwares, but does not allow their modification. Linux is expected to include drivers for Ralink cards starting from version 2.6.24. However, these drivers will require firmware to function. Completely Free Software Linux distributions such as Debian are expected to be unable to support current Ralink chipsets unless the firmware's license is changed. Old chipsets such as RT2400 (802.11b) and RT2500 (802.11g) should be supported.
