Riddle me this: What do you get when you combine a brilliant business report with an immediate stock-price drop? Answer: a buy-in opportunity.

That's what happened to Atheros Communications (Nasdaq: ATHR) last night. Second-quarter sales came in at $238 million and non-GAAP earnings came to rest at $0.67 per share. Both metrics beat management's market-moving optimistic forecast by a fair margin and also left Wall Street estimates in the rearview mirror. Atheros also reported the acquisition of Shanghai-based optical networking upstart Opulan Technologies, breaking ground on a whole new market opportunity for Atheros in a $72 million deal.

Atheros is going from strength to strength in many markets. One notable growth vector is in Wi-Fi chips for wireless handsets, where Atheros ships chips to a plethora of leading manufacturers including Motorola (NYSE: MOT), Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. The Samsung Galaxy S series of high-end Android phones comes with Atheros Wi-Fi inside, for example. Curiously, Atheros also name-dropped Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) as an Android platform customer. Should we infer that the concept of Android-based gadgets from HP isn't quite dead yet?

Another growth market is in connected home entertainment systems, where next-generation TV sets and current Blu-ray players tend to ship with networking components and features. That's how you get premium content like Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) video streams, Twitter feeds, and Flickr slide shows onto the big screen, and many models ship with both wireless and various kinds of wired networking. That's a multiple-sale opportunity for Atheros for every retail unit shipped.

So why, given all of this delicious strength, did Atheros open 7% lower this morning before rebounding? Analysts point to weakness in the PC segment because of several factors: increasing low-end competition from Broadcom (Nasdaq: BRCM); shaky economies across Atheros stronghold markets in Europe; unseasonably strong sales at the start of the year, making it tough to keep up a sequential show of strength; and netbook computers cooling down after making money for Atheros the past couple of years.

The 10% slowdown in PC-related sales seems perfectly reasonable for a division that pulls in only 28% of Atheros' sales -- and this too shall pass. You see weakness; I see an opportunity to improve and shock the market. Atheros has trailed the S&P 500 index since the first-quarter report, and this paradoxical decline just adds more value to the equation. There is nothing wrong with the business, and good luck finding another stock trading at 11 times forward earnings while sales and non-GAAP profits are more than doubling year over year. This is a world-beater investment opportunity.

I have an "outperform" on Atheros in Motley Fool CAPS, and I'm sticking to that. You can follow in my all-star footsteps by clicking right here.