Prism (chipset)

The Prism brand is used for wireless networking integrated circuit (commonly called "chips") technology from Conexant for wireless LANs.[1][2] They were formerly 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.

Intersil firmware

Lucent/Agere

  • WEP
  • WPA (TKIP in hardware)

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. 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

References

  1. ^ a b c "Conexant to integrate Intersil 802.11b technology into networking chipsets". EE Times. 9 March 2002. Retrieved 23 March 2026.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h Tourrilhes, Jean (25 July 2007). "The devices, the drivers - 802.11a, 802.11g and 802.11n". HP Inc. Retrieved 23 March 2026 – via GitHub.
  3. ^ a b c "Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wireless protocols: a survey and a comparison". IEEE Wireless Communications. 12 (1): 19. 28 February 2005. doi:10.1109/MWC.2005.1404569. eISSN 1558-0687 – via IEEE Xplore. The Intersil Wi-Fi business was sold to GlobespanVirata, which was then acquired by Conexant.
  4. ^ "Wi-Fi chipmakers of the World unite!". The Register. 11 November 2003. Retrieved 23 March 2026.
  5. ^ Verikoukis, Ch.; Perez-Neira, A. I.; Alonso-Zarate, J.; Skiannis, Ch. (4 December 2009). Experimental Performance Evaluation of a MAC Protocol for Cooperative ARQ Scenarios. GLOBECOM 2009 - 2009 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (published 4 March 2010). p. 1. doi:10.1109/GLOCOM.2009.5425476. ISBN 978-1-4244-4148-8. ISSN 1930-529X. Retrieved 23 March 2026 – via IEEE Xplore. HostAP is a Linux based driver for 802.11b WLAN cards based on Intersil's Prism 2.5.
  6. ^ a b Bangolae, Sangeetha; Bell, Carol; Qi, Emily (3 July 2006). Performance study of fast BSS transition using IEEE 802.11r. IWCMC06: 2006 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference. Vancouver, British Colombia, Canada: Association for Computing Machinery. p. 741. doi:10.1145/1143549.1143696. ISBN 978-1-59593-306-5. Retrieved 23 March 2026. The AP implementation is based on version 0.4.1 of hostapd and the hostap driver for WLAN cards based on the Intersil Prism 2/2.5/3 chipset.
  7. ^ Specifications of PCMCIA Type II 802.11b card: 802C12 (PDF) (Report) (2A ed.). Actiontec. 9 August 2001. pp. 2–3. Retrieved 23 March 2026 – via FCC.
  8. ^ Smith, Tony (30 Apr 2003). "Wi-Fi Alliance drives improved WLAN security". The Register. Retrieved 23 March 2026.
  9. ^ "Kernel Interfaces Manual: wi(4)". FreeBSD Manual Pages (FreeBSD 4.7 ed.). The FreeBSD Project. 2 May 2002. Retrieved 23 March 2026. Cards based on the Intersil PRISM-II and PRISM-2.5 chips also have a host-based access point mode which allows the card to act as an access point (base station). Access points are different than operating in IBSS mode. They operate in BSS mode.
  10. ^ a b "p54". Linux Wireless Documentation. kernel.org. Retrieved 23 March 2026.
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