Cypress Has Begun Publishing Broadcom Datasheets

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Cypress Has Begun Publishing Broadcom Datasheets

Earlier this summer Cypress semiconductor acquired Broadcom's wireless "Internet of Things" business. With that associated IP, Cypress has begun making public NDA-free data-sheets on associated chipsets...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Cypress-Publishing-Broadcom

[darkbasic]

Good news.

[LaeMing]

I have had only occasional but always positive experiences with Cypress. They seem very developer-friendly.

[Zajec]

All of this public information will hopefully be useful in improving some of the Broadcom wireless Linux drivers.

So did you find any MAC or PHY documentation or any programming guide? I'd love to get some link, because noone found anything like that so far.

Pinouts, electrical / timing characteristics, etc. aren't useful for driver development.

[Zajec]

I posted a reply but it has appeared as unapproved. Am I being censored now?!

[Scrumlord]

It's time to open up their STA drivers. Who would have thought, huh? We may end up with a lot more open WNICs from them very soon. That is if I understand correctly which part of business is now with Cypress. AFAIK, the only issue with BCM hardware is that they like to offload as much as possible to a chip without making it possible to change something with new versions of firmware.

[Adarion]

That sounds like it could be a real relief. No more avoiding BC chips in the future? Support for existing chips? No more weird firmware cuttery from W32 blob drivers? And maybe one far day less hassles trying to find out which chips a laptop actually has built into - because you can buy it and it will just work no matter what?

[willmore]

I've been dealing with Cypress since the late 80's and they've always been very friendly to developers. I was working on a DSP system at the time and I called them up to get a datasheet on some of their parts. The people I talked to were very friendly and sent me all the data sheets I needed and offered to send me samples as well.

Later, in the early 2000's, I was working on one of the PSoC chips. At this point, datasheets were online, but they still offered me parts and an eval board *free*. That level of support is not common in the industry. I've always held them in high respect for this behavior.

Cypress seems to be a company that understands the importance of supporting people developing for their parts. So, this is a very welcome move. Thanks, Cypress.

[GreatEmerald]

BCM43143? That sounds very interesting, since I believe I have this one on one of the machines I maintain. broadcom-wl kinda works with it, but the network range is much smaller than on Windows, whereas the open drivers don't seem to load on it properly altogether.

[starshipeleven]

I posted a reply but it has appeared as unapproved. Am I being censored now?!

Thank vBullettin (forum software) for that. It's supposed to be an anti-spam filter, but it misfires daily.