Without an antenna of much greater size the range of tiny smart dust communication devices is measured in a few millimeters and they may be vulnerable to electromagnetic disablement and destruction by microwave exposure.
A Smart Dust research proposal[3] was presented to DARPA written by Kristofer S. J. Pister, Joe Kahn, and Bernhard Boser, all from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997.
The project led to a working mote smaller than a grain of rice,[4] and larger "COTS Dust" devices kicked off the TinyOS effort at Berkeley.
[6] The Ultra-Fast Systems component of the Nanoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Glasgow is a founding member of a large international consortium which is developing a related concept: smart specks.
[9] In 2022, a Nature paper written by Shyamnath Gollakota, Vikram Iyer, Hans Gaensbauer and Thomas Daniel, all from the University of Washington, presented tiny light-weight programmable battery-free wireless sensors that can be dispersed in the wind.