Silicon Valley Nation: Dust Networks expands horizons

Key differentiator
There is a key difference between the Dust approach and those of software companies, whose algorithms are integrated with a silicon solution to create an aware or smarter network and to manage power consumption, Weiss said.

She added:

"We do our own silicon... because we looked around and said we could do so much better than that. Most network architectures allow you to have power for the backbone, so obsessing about power for your 802.15.4 radio is not so important. But when you're like us and you're running a protocol where you're duty cycling so you can have every node in the network be low power, you obsess about low power."

A year into its relationship with Linear, Dust also benefits from Linear's larger portfolio.

"It's not just the wireless aspect of the wireless sensor node anymore," Weiss said. "We can now handle everything from power management to sensor signal conditioning. Longer term, this same 'big picture' will inform and influence future product development across all relevant Linear products."


The fall announcement also marked a market expansion for Linear and Dust. Dust's technology handles the wireless HART standard, for industrial applications, but also can handle Internet Protocol stacks  (6LoWPAN, or IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks) "which, as you can imagine is kind of the rest of the world," Weiss said.

From a technology and engineering perspective, this year-old marriage is making sense. Linear's historic strength, after all, has been in design blocking and tackling and differentiating its products. From a market perspective, of course, the jury's still out.

There's no doubt that smart, wireless, battery-powered networks are an enormous opportunity. And the industrial data-acquisition market is the first and most logical target. Dust already has customers there (Emerson Process, for example, bases all of its products on Dust technology). 

"It's cheaper to add a Dust node (for $50) than any other way of getting information in … put it there, turn it on and you're connected," Dobkin said.

But there's a much bigger world when you start to consider home and commercial networks.

They won't turn it down if that's how the future develops, according to Dobkin, who nevertheless implies some leeriness at the prospect:

"As a company, we like to run at a well-controlled rate," he said. "Sometimes consumer looks really bumpy to us. But if Dust Networks gets into something, there is no alternative. And that's where we like to be: no alternative."


Related stories:
--Linear Tech moves to integrate Dust Nets' wireless sensors

--Linear Technology acquires Dust Networks