Silicon Valley Nation: Dust Networks expands horizons

MILPITAS, Calif. -- When you make your first acquisition in 30 years, you pray it doesn't blow up in your face. After all, you waited that long, people expect you've thought it through.

So far, at the one-year anniversary of Linear Technology's purchase of low-power wireless networking provider Dust Networks, no detonation.

"I think we lucked out on that acquisition," said Bob Dobkin, Linear's co-founder and CTO. "We got a very good functioning company. The technology works well. They have a lot of smart people who haven't left."

One of those is Dust's erstwhile CEO, Joy Weiss (shown), an MIT-minted engineer who cut her networking teeth for 15 years at Nortel. She's now settled into her new title as president of Dust Networks at Linear Technology, a nod to the brand recognition she and her investors built (Dust parts, however, now take a LTC designations).

"The only thing they lacked was sales," Dobkin noted. After the December 2011 acquisition, "they moved from three sales people to 200. I think we'll find the sales go up pretty quickly now."

In a world in which most acquisitions fail at one level or another, it may be a simple cultural and engineering synchronicity that, so far, seems to be working. 

In October, Linear rolled the martMesh LTC5800 SoC and LTP5900 (module) families, said to be the lowest power IEEE 802.15.4-compliant wireless sensor networking products. The product--the first Dust part under the LTC naming convention--was not an extension of the company's earlier technology but a complete redesign, according to Erik Soule, Linear's vice president and general manager of signal conditioning products.

"This was a major re-architecting," Soule said.

So early into the acquisition, few might fault Dust for simply tweaking the existing part and focusing on leveraging that big new sales force.

No such luck, according to Weiss.

The re-architecting stems from Dust's goal of broadening the application base for its technology as much as possible.

"Our thesis is you want to be able to put a sensor anywhere," Weiss said. "The lower power I can make my stuff...the most cost effective it becomes. It's sort of a virtuous cycle."

The LTC5800 is half as much power as its predecessor version, partly because of that redesign. Broadcasting on spread spectrum at 2.4 GHz the LTC 5800 specs receive current a 4.5 mA and transmit current at 5.4-9.7 mA.