Inside almost every electronic product there is a clock tracking the time of day. There is one in your watch of course, but also in your cell phone, computer, tablet, microwave oven, Wi-Fi router, printer, car, and just about everything else.

Most of these clocks are presently based on 32kHz quartz crystal resonators. These were first introduced in the 1970’s and have proliferated, with about ten billion units being built each year. Yes, that is billion with a B, and it is more than one for each person on earth, every year. Of course most of you reading this blog buy more than one a year.

Now MEMS will replace these crystals. MEMS can keep time better, with smaller size, more reliably, and with less power. Compared to the legacy quartz crystals, SiTime’s 32kHz MEMS oscillators:

• Take a sixth of the PCB area
• Use half the power
• Are fifteen times more reliable
• Are twice as accurate

We have been sampling these devices for a while. Customer interest is tremendous, and we expect that these parts will drive SiTime’s fastest production ramp ever.

So here it is … Day #1 of a new way for Humanity to keep time.

The quartz timing industry is now seeing a revolution that they thought was impossible. Even a few years ago most industry insiders said it could not happen. Now I don’t hear that anymore. They all know that change is coming. Change happens all around us – film cameras moved to silicon, disk storage is moving to silicon – there is a long list and quartz is on it.

Now some leaders in the industry speak with a sense of wishing it were not so, or hoping that it would progress more slowly. Some speak with a sense of riding through it or holding tough. But from the few more capable leaders one hears a determination to move forward and transition their businesses with the technology. That is the right thing to do, but it is difficult.

When folks look back on the change from quartz to silicon timing they will say it was inevitable.

I am very happy with this! For over 30 years, EE Times has been a premier publication for the electronics industry; the place to go for news, analysis and well considered opinion. As a young engineer I used to carry my copy of EE Times constantly. In those days it was published as a broadsheet. It is now published on the web and their writers and editors are still completely up to speed. Wikipedia calls them the “newspaper of record for design and development engineers and technical managers.”

So having EE Times recognize SiTime is a big deal. It is something like an EE-Grammy award!

Last week SiTime’s CEO, Rajesh Vashist, described it perfectly: “If cars were made by semi companies then Ferrari’s would cost $25.” And that is it, that is the whole thing.

First, it’s about performance; always striving for more performance. Second it’s about value; always striving for more value. It is not necessarily about price. In semiconductors we do lower costs, but it is much more than that. We make things better at the right price.

Would you buy a Ferrari for $25? No! If you wanted to go fast you might buy a McLaren F1 for $250. And what would Ferrari do? They would enhance their “low end” machines. Their new cars would be so good, so well appointed, so fast, so safe, and use so little fuel that you would surely prefer them to today’s F1’s.

That is the core belief we hold in the semiconductor industry, that everything must offer higher performance and better value, and we are continuously extending what we mean by performance and value, we are continuously moving the goalpost. This is the core of what SiTime is doing, and we are bringing this to the quartz timing industry.

Passives used to dominate circuit design. A tube-based TV from 1965 might have had ten active tubes and a hundred passive resistors and capacitors. Now my smart phone has millions of active transistors but only a few hundred passives. (I’m counting the discrete passives here.) The ratio of active to passive components has increased a million fold.

Why does this matter in precision timing? Timing is divided into two parts: precision oscillators for high performance applications, and resonators for low cost applications. And MEMS oscillators have been replacing quartz oscillators in high performance applications, but not quartz crystals in low cost applications. So that is active replacing active.

But that is not the whole story. Silicon is moving down in cost faster than the quartz. MEMS oscillators will soon be lower cost than quartz crystals. And actually, we are seeing that some folks are already using MEMS oscillators where they had been using quartz crystals. Someday, and that is not tomorrow or next year but is soon enough, active MEMS oscillators will replace both active quartz oscillators and passive quartz crystals. MEMS oscillators will be used in both high performance and low cost applications.

And that is another example of how it looks when silicon replaces incumbent technologies.  Actives replace passives.

In Deloitte’s Fast 500TM ranking of the fastest growing semiconductor companies in North America, MEMS companies are ranked as #1 and #2. SiTime is #1 and InvenSense is #2. These are not microprocessor companies, not memory companies, not RF companies, not general purpose linear companies, but rather companies that leverage precision analog and MEMS technologies.

Twenty years ago, MEMS was outside of the mainstream. Twenty years ago a colleague told me MEMS was destined to be a small side attraction in semiconductors, almost a curiosity. He said, “You are carrying a microprocessor on you, some memory, and analog circuits, but no MEMS components.” Well, now we rely on MEMS accelerometers, gyroscopes, pressure sensors, filters, oscillators, and more. Virtually none of our new cars would run without MEMS, and MEMS timing is ubiquitous. And indeed, I am carrying MEMS in my phone.

But MEMS is shorthand for MEMS and precision circuitry. The small mechanical elements need very precise analog circuitry to work. And it is this marriage that is dominating the new applications. At SiTime we think of ourselves as a precision analog company that is enabled by MEMS. Or sometimes as a MEMS company that relies on precision analog. Both views are equally right; it is this combination that is critical.

This combination is why the incumbent quartz companies can’t build MEMS oscillators on their own. Most of them don’t have MEMS, and most of them don’t have precision analog. None of them have both. Precision timing used to be about quartz, but now it is about silicon. And that is why precision timing is now part of the semiconductor industry. Combine that with the growing need for timing, and you can see why MEMS and precision analog are at the core of the fastest growing semiconductor companies.

We can dissect what this means in many ways, but I want to look today at what timing is in the semiconductor industry. The semiconductor field is often segmented into digital, analog, and radio. Precision timing has not usually been included in semiconductors but rather was thought of, and rightly so, as a non-semiconductor component. This was right because the quartz companies that dominated in timing were definitely not semiconductor companies. They worked differently, thought differently, and sold their parts differently. Now SiTime is “siliconizing” the timing industry, and as we do that we are creating a new segment in the semiconductor space.

The key is in the verb “to siliconize”. When silicon replaced film in cameras it changed an industry, but it also changed how we use cameras. We began taking more pictures. Our photos improved in quality, our cameras became smaller and more convenient, we no longer had to pay for expensive printing, and we began posting and emailing photos to friends. We siliconized cameras and now we get higher quality, save money, and take more pics. Same thing is happening in timing. We are specifying better quality oscillators, saving money, and using more oscillators. This is all reflected in the timing industry’s numbers: specifications are tightening, prices are falling, and volumes are rising.

For instance, in the airline industry the products are flights from point A to point B. The context is safety, on-time arrival, availability, and customer service. Unfortunately, many airlines don’t practice all of those. This video is light and fun, but its message is dead serious for airline execs. Harvard Business Review published this study on it.

In the semiconductor industry the context is quality, delivery, price, and support. Customers need chips with great specs, but they also require high reliability, on time delivery, and a compelling price. And if there is a problem, customers need it fixed. At SiTime we make great products, with functions and specifications that are valued by our customers. But just as important, we build them with exceptional quality, deliver them on time, supply them at the industry’s best prices, and fix any potential issues immediately and completely.

Building a great company sounds like a business-school mantra, and it is. Seems intuitive or even obvious, and it is. But it is difficult to get right. In fact, while it is difficult to build great products, it is even more difficult to build a great company. One strives to give customers the best possible experience. But if even a single part of the whole is missing or poorly done then that experience is not a great one.

Today I read an article that called SiTime “the leader in MEMS oscillators”. Not just the technology leader, or quality leader, or volume leader, or price leader, but the leader. That means leading in everything – technology, quality, production, delivery, distribution, price, support, and every other detail that matters to customers.

Striving to do all these things is one of the ways we are building a great company, and we feel it is critical to delivering great products.

The reasons crystals do this are not completely understood, but they include surface imperfections, contamination, material interfaces, anchor stress, and spurious resonances. With careful design and fabrication, hops and pops can be reduced but not removed.

The size of these sets a limit on how stable a frequency one can derive from a TCXO. There are other limiting factors in crystals, like compensation error, hysteresis, and retrace – but hops and pops cause abrupt frequency shifts, are unpredictable, and are particularly insidious. This means that a quartz oscillator can switch from one to another frequency suddenly. In high precision TCXOs these steps can be tens to hundreds of parts per billion. That may sound small, but many precision applications like GPS and timing references can fail when this happens.

Getting these hops and pops down to even to a few tens of parts per billion requires highly developed processes that only a handful of quartz companies have. High precision TCXOs with minimum hops and pops are rare and expensive, but still often not good enough. I know of one company that has been buying the world’s best quartz TCXOs and then testing and discarding half of them because of hops and pops. Why not just ask the quartz suppliers to provide oscillators pre-screened? It seems their suppliers couldn’t do that.

But SiTime’s MEMS oscillators don’t show hops and pops. Why is this?

First of all, we use a completely different material system. We build our resonators in silicon, not quartz, and billions of dollars have been invested in silicon to make it the purest and most defect free material in the world. Second, we have very clean resonators. Their surfaces are contamination-free, again because of the billions of dollars invested in silicon process and fabrication. Third, we have far less external interaction with our resonators. We don’t have metal on our resonators or material interfaces, and nothing touches them. Fourth, we build complex three dimensional resonators rather than the simple plates that quartz uses, and therefore we have the design freedom to avoid the spurious edge reflections that plague quartz.

In short, when new technologies replace old technologies, they don’t always just reduce the problems with the old technologies – sometimes they eliminate the problems entirely.  That is what we have done with hops and pops.

At the very highest data rates even slight noise in the transmit or receive clocks can degrade data fidelity. And because of this the cleanliness standards on these clocks are very tight. The primary spec is that the jitter integrated from 12 kHz to 20 MHz must be less than one picosecond (one trillionth of a second). SiTime has the only MEMS oscillators capable of meeting this spec. In fact, SiTime’s new oscillators beat this by a factor of two, delivering clocks with only a half-picosecond integrated jitter.

In quartz, oscillators that can beat a picosecond are often called “extremely low jitter”. The extremely is well deserved – it is a very low number. For example, in half a picosecond light travels only 150 microns in a vacuum. An electrical signal in a copper wire travels at about half the speed of light. Thus a clock signal traveling in a printed circuit board goes about 75 microns in a half picosecond. That is roughly the width of a human hair.

So think of what these oscillators are doing. They are producing electrical waves that travel out from their pins, across PC boards, and into application ICs. These waves move at half the speed of light while their edges are where they should be to the width of a human hair. Pretty amazing!