MEMS-Based Silicon Oscillator - Features and Benefits

Micro-Electrical Mechanical Systems (MEMS) have been greatly expanding in popularity over the past decade. While the automotive industry found MEMS vital for vehicle safety applications (tire pressure monitoring, air bag sensors, etc), these MEMS components have more recently been put to use in systems including sensors, gyroscopes, and microphones. These systems are used in high end electronics devices like Smartphone's, Digital cameras, tablets, gaming devices, etc.

In the past five years, MEMS-based Silicon oscillators have been replacing quartz oscillators in electronic applications. MEMS-based Silicon oscillators have numerous advantages over quartz including more features, higher performance, faster availability, higher robustness and reliability, along with a lower cost.

MEMS-based Silicon oscillators were first used in consumer electronics in such devices as laptops, DVRs, digital cameras, stereos, etc. But since SiTime has recently released a much higher performance MEMS–based Silicon Oscillator, these devices are being used in high performance applications like:

Telecom infrastructure – highly stable MEMS-based Silicon Oscillators, such as MEMS TCXOs (Temperature Compensated Oscillator) have been designed in by companies developing core routers based on SONET and Synchronous Ethernet and optical networking systems.

Differential MEMS-based Silicon oscillators have also replaced high frequency SAW (Surface Acoustic Wave) crystal oscillators, leading to their usage in Storage Area Networks and RAID systems based on SATA, SAS and FibreChannel protocols.

MEMS-based Silicon Voltage Controlled Oscillators provides a level of pullability and precision-tuning that is crucial in synchronization of clock signals. This leads to wireless applications, such as cell-phone base-stations and repeaters to start adopting the usage of differential and single-ended MEMS-based Silicon oscillators, which are well-known for their robustness, reliability, and low phase noise.

The addition of programmable signaling levels makes customizing your oscillator for any product or application easy. Available signaling levels include LVPECL, LVDS, CML, HCSL, or LVCMOS on various Silicon oscillator devices. Frequency is another customizable feature to enhance your system performance. Operating voltage is also a programmable feature, with options of 1.8V, 2.5V, 2.8V, and 3.3V, allowing interface with a wide variety of SOCs and ASSPs.

The long lead time for crystal oscillators is another disadvantage in which Silicon Oscillators have a solution. Lead times of 3-5 weeks enables better inventory control/ management, flexibility in meeting upsides, and simplified supply chain.

Because of a superb frequency stability, as low as 10PPM, the system timing margin and reliability of your electronics will increase greatly. Better stability also offers improved immunity against low frequency environmental noise from power lines, fluorescent lights and transformers.

With a robustness and reliability as high as 50,000 G of shock resistance, 70 G of vibration resistance, and 500 million hours of mean time between failure, MEMS-based Silicon oscillators are 10 times more reliable than quartz.

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