Linear Technologies announced today that they've acquired Dust Networks. Unless you are deeply into chip technology, you probably don't know who Linear is (www.linear.com). And unless you have been following very closely the minutiae of the Wireless Wars, you don't know who Dust is either.
But Dust is very important. Kris Pister, a UC Berkeley professor, invented the term "smart dust" to describe mesh networks of very low power sensors. One of the obvious first uses for these sensors is like electronic caltrops on the battlefield...scatter sensors from the air, let them hook up the network and then the soldiers on the ground get a very high resolution picture of where the enemy is, and what the terrain actually looks like. There are persistent rumors that this technology is being extensively used in Afghanistan. But obviously, nobody at DOD is talking-- nor probably should they.
Dust Networks's CEO, Joy Weiss, realized that the real key to success was to develop low power mesh networking technology for industrial and commercial uses. Early on, they worked with the HART Communications Foundation's WirelessHART development team.
Yup, Dust Networks' firmware is what makes WirelessHART go. And they make firmware for Zigbee and several other protocols as well. So they are very important to the entire concept of industrial and commercial low power wireless sensor technology.
The problem with this, obviously, is that Dust was a startup. As such, they were not quite economically stable enough to base a multimillion dollar product campaign on. The major automation vendors, like Emerson, Honeywell, and others, encouraged other firmware developers to create a "firmware stack" that worked basically like Dust's.
Now all the fears about Dust's stability have been put to rest. Dust is now a part of Linear Technology Corporation, a long-lived Fortune 500 (NASDAC: LLTC) corporation that has a huge product line, much of which is aimed at low power devices.
Dust now has the support of a company large enough to make all the issues about stability and single-sourcing of WirelessHART firmware go away.
This is yet another very large boost to the success of WirelessHART as the industrial sensor network protocol of choice.
