Smaller Chipset Manufactures
Marvell Technology Group creates SoCs for networking devices, often pairing them with Broadcom transceivers. Chips in Marvell's Armada 38x family are equipped with ARMv7 Cortex-A9 dual-core processors (with the 88F6810 chip, Armada 380, being an exception). They feature GbE, DDR3/3L/4, PCIe 2.0 links and a host of other features that make Marvell competitive. We're not seeing many devices with the company's hardware, though. Armada XP (MV78XXX) chips, with up to a quad-core ARM v7 PJ4 processors, seem to share the same fate.
A new addition to Marvell's Avastar SoC family was announced in Q1 2015, targeted at enterprise APs, hotspots and residential multi-stream (video or gaming) applications. An earlier iteration, the 88W8864, supported up to 1.3 Gb/s and 4x4 MIMO. It was used in the Linksys WRT1200AC and WRT1900AC wireless routers.
We're calling it a "smaller" manufacturer, but in reality, Realtek is one of the largest chip makers in the world. But the company's networking segment peaked with its 10/100 Ethernet controllers. Its wireless offering haven't enjoyed the same level of market penetration. So it's not the most popular chip on the block, but it does deserve a mention: the 2013 ADSL2+ modem/router from RealTek, based on its Lextra LX processor (a 32-bit implementation of the MIPS architecture) held its own for a while. It was used in D-Link's DSL-2740E, Huawei's WS319 and other routers.
Quantenna specializes in wireless SoC transceivers. Its R&D focused on high-end 802.11ac and 802.11n devices. Competing neck and neck with the giants of the industry, Quantenna introduced a number of new devices in 2015, all on the cutting edge. It was first to launch a 4x4 MU-MIMO 802.11ac chipset, and has demonstrated a 10G system. The QSR2000 Wave 2 is a transceiver designed for high-speed Wi-Fi routers. It is marketed as an integrated chipset for 802.11an/ac or 802.11b/g/n Wave 2 applications, dual-band switchable, with 4x4 MU-MIMO four spatial streams. It has 80MHz channels (for the 5GHz band), PCIe 2.0 connectivity and a peak PHY of 1700 Mb/s.
The QSR10G family of chipsets supports 10Gb speeds. There are four variants, ranging from the "U"—a top-tier 12-stream, dual-band device with a peak PHY rate of 10 Gb/s—down to the "5" variant, with eight-stream 5GHz single-band operation with a peak PHY rate of 8.6 Gb/s.