Essentially an enhanced version of its top-selling single-chip AR5005G, the AR2417 has "significantly increased integration" for a bill of material reduction of "30-45 percent" compared to competitive products. In addition to integrating the media access controller, baseband processor and 2.4GHz radio, the AR2417 also incorporates a low noise amplifier (LNA) and power amplifier (PA) onto a single CMOS chip.
The AR2417 includes two development kits, which provide upgrade paths from previous Atheros 802.11g PCI platforms. The first kit includes a 2-layer, half-height mini-PCI design for WLAN gateway applications. The second kit includes a two-layer, single-sided cardbus for aftermarket wireless PC cards. Software support is provided for Windows XP, 2000 and Vista for cardbus clients and Linux for APs.