SiTime’s precision timing solutions won the top honor in the advanced materials category in the 2023 LEAP (Leadership in Engineering Achievement Program) Awards.
Sponsored by WTWH Media, the LEAP Awards (Leadership in Engineering Achievement Program) celebrate the most innovative and forward-thinking products serving the design engineering community. WTWH’s brands cross four of the company’s design engineering publications: Design World, Fluid Power World, Fastener Engineering, and EE World. This year’s LEAP Award winners were chosen in 11 categories by an independent judging panel of 10 engineering and academic professionals.
Commenting on SiTime’s winning entry, the judges noted: "MEMS technology has shown significant improvement in new technology. Move over Quartz, your time is done. Pun intended.
Timing devices are the heartbeat of every digital electronic system, providing accurate and stable timing. SiTime is disrupting the timing market by replacing fragile quartz crystals with resonators built with advanced microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology. Traditionally, the most common clock sources are crystal oscillators, a 100-year-old technology that has reached a point of maturity yielding only marginal improvements. SiTime’s silicon MEMS-based resonators and oscillators are 50x more reliable than quartz, making them an ideal alternative to legacy quartz products for today’s demanding applications.
Silicon MEMS devices are used throughout electronics systems, serving as gyroscopes, accelerometers, microphones, sensors, magnetometers and many other functions. Silicon MEMS devices, including SiTime’s MEMS resonators, can be manufactured at scale in mainstream fabs, with excellent quality and reliability for countless applications.
SiTime’s MEMS resonators are much smaller than quartz crystals, enabling smaller footprint timing devices for space-sensitive designs. Smaller size and less mass mean more resilience to environmental shock and vibration. Compared to quartz, MEMS resonators have 100x better resilience to EMI disturbances. This resiliency is beneficial for applications with high currents and electromagnetic fields. Silicon MEMS timing devices have excellent intrinsic material properties, enabling higher quality and reliability, excellent stability over temperature, and better performance in real-life operating conditions.
For these reasons, SiTime’s MEMS-based precision timing devices are gaining market attention and traction and displacing quartz across all applications and industries. While quartz has served the industry for decades, the future of timing technology belongs to silicon MEMS.
Congratulations, SiTime, for this well-deserved LEAP Award recognition.