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Fortune 1000 companies must carefully manage the technologies they employ if they are to meet their customer expectations. A technology that is
sourced from a group of venture-stage fabless semiconductor firms represents a major supply chain risk to global firms whose customers expect
product support for many years going forward. Today the list of WSN
suppliers no longer represents an exceptional risk to the supply chain of
global giants like Emerson, GE, Honeywell, and Siemens.
For Dust Networks, besides joining a $1.5 billion chip company with global
presence, the acquisition has enabled Dust to adopt a mature testing and
commercialization process. Linear uses this internal rigor to help ensure
Low energy consumption and
reliable end-to-end delivery have
been the primary design goals of
Dust Networks for many years, and
this explains their leadership in the
industrial WSN market.
the high quality it uses as a differentiator. Roughly 40
percent of Linear’s business is with industrial customers, so Linear is familiar with their demands. Similarly,
Dust Networks chose to focus on industrial WSN applications from its earliest days.
Through dialog with
industrial customers Dust developed its product mantra
of “low power and reliable delivery.” These two attrib-
utes have governed Dust’s design decisions for years and skillfully pursuing both goals accounts for Dust’s market share leadership in industrial
WSN applications.
Dust has adopted Linear’s processes for its latest product release.
The
Dust acquisition, then, is not merely a plan to grow volume through wider
distribution. Rather, it also adds value through improvements to Dust’s
internal development and commercialization processes.
Technical Growth
WSN has also grown technically during the past year. The most important
development is the completion of the “e” revision to the IEEE 802.15.4
standard. Though the 15.4 standard has been published for years, most
commercial WSN applications have used non-standard medium access
(MAC) rules to optimize the performance of their own networks. WirelessHART, ISA100.11a, ZigBee and IPv6 sensor networks all depended on a
customized MAC layer to achieve low power consumption and reliable
end-to-end message delivery. This limits the value of the IEEE standard,
because applications needed their own specialized MACs.
IEEE 802.15.4e makes important changes to the defined MAC layer. It creates a standard and fully defined MAC that can support diverse types of
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2012