Date: 15/07/2012

MEMS oscillators from SiTime for clocking FPGA chips

FPGA leader Xilinx uses SiTime’s SiT9102 differential oscillator as the system clock and the SiT8102 oscillator as the HDMI reference clock on the Virtex-7 FPGA VC707 Evaluation Kit and the Kintex-7 FPGA KC705 Evaluation Kit. In addition, the Zynq-7000 dual ARM processor evaluation kit uses the same two oscillators plus an additional SiT8103 single-ended oscillator.

Why MEMS oscillators: Offer better frequency stability, less jitter, better withstanding against shock and vibration in comparison to crystal oscillator.

“Xilinx is committed to providing our customers with very high performance solutions that are flexible, configurable and accelerate design cycles,” said Steve Logan, analog marketing manager at Xilinx. “SiTime’s programmable MEMS oscillators offer unmatched flexibility and configurability, which complements our FPGAs. We had great success in using SiTime’s MEMS oscillators on our previous generation kits and are expanding their usage on all our 28nm 7 series development platforms.”

“Xilinx and SiTime are market leaders in their respective fields and we share a common goal – to provide best-in-class programmable solutions that accelerate customers’ design cycles and improve their system reliability,” said Piyush Sevalia, VP of marketing at SiTime. “Our flexible timing solutions deliver unique features and reliability that is ten times better than legacy quartz timing products. This is one more example of how SiTime’s revolutionary MEMS technology and advanced analog design is displacing quartz and driving the electronics industry’s move to MEMS-based timing.”

Semico has projected that 2011-2016 CAGR for MEMS oscillators will be 85.6%, approaching $1.2 billion by 2016. Semico suggests this is the perfect time for investment, because the market is poised to take off in 2013.