Date: 21/03/2011

Rugged and low power consuming MEMS oscillator from SiTime

SiTime Corporation has introduced the SiT8004, a MEMS based frequency oscillator. SiTime claims this device is the industry's lowest power high frequency oscillator featuring 6.7mA of typical current consumption at 125MHz, which is up to 66% lower than that of a standard crystal oscillator. This device is suggested for designing high performance networking, video, computing and storage applications.

"Reducing energy usage is a key goal of electronics manufacturers," said Piyush Sevalia, vice president of marketing for SiTime. "Typically, quartz oscillator suppliers do not have analog circuit expertise as they buy their oscillator die from semiconductor providers. Therefore, they have not been able to deliver low power devices for high frequency applications. SiTime uniquely has both resonator and analog circuit expertise, enabling us to integrate and deliver compelling features to our customers. The SiT8004 is an excellent example of this expertise: not only does it reduce oscillator power consumption by up to 66%, but it is also a drop-in replacement for quartz oscillators, which allows system vendors to reduce energy usage with zero design effort."

The SiT8004 supports any frequency between 125 MHz and 150 MHz, it is also available in popular, pre-configured options such as:
125 MHz and 125.00375 MHz for GPON, EPON and Gigabit Ethernet
133 MHz and 133.33333 MHz for MEMORY (DDR) and PCI
148.5 MHz and 148.35164 MHz for HDMI and Pixel clocks
150 MHz for SATA/SAS

The other features of this chip includes:
Ability to configure the device to any custom frequency with 5 decimal places of accuracy, and receive samples within 1 week. Custom frequencies such as 125.00375 MHz (instead of 125 MHz) are used for Gigabit Ethernet to improve Bit Error Rate (BER).
Offers frequency stability of low ±20PPM that can enhance overall system stability in cloud computing applications.
100% drop-in replacement of quartz solutions in all four industry-standard surface-mount packages (7.0x5.0 mm, 5.0x3.2 mm, 3.2x2.5 mm and 2.5x2.0 mm)
Features 500 million hours in mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) that is critical to high reliability, fail-safe systems in networking, communication and servers.
More rugged compared to quartz oscillator with shock resistance of up to 50,000 G and vibration resistance of up to 70 G.

The SiT8004 is available in high volume production today. The list price for 10,000 units of the 125MHz SiT8004 in a 2.5x2.0mm package, 25 PPM stability, industrial temperature range (-40 to +85 °C) is $0.98.

For more info visit www.sitime.com