One of the first commercial applications of MEMS (micro-electro mechanical systems) technology was for sensors used in automotive safety systems. MEMS technology has spread to other applications including microphones for mobile phones and acceleration sensors and gyroscopes for portable gaming devices and tablets. Now MEMS technology is successfully used in timing devices such as resonators, oscillators and clock generators used in a wide variety of electronics systems. MEMS timing is now bringing new benefits to systems that use touchscreen technology. Touchscreens, used for human-machine interface, have become widely used in many devices especially in portable consumer devices that use capacitive touch sensing as the primary method of user interface.
Products with touchscreens are often used in harsh and noisy environments. Touchscreen-based devices are often used in industrial applications in environments with vibration and EMI, or in portable consumer devices that experience shock and vibration. Exposure to these environmental stressors can impact system performance. Quartz-based oscillators are fragile and are known to have reliability issues. In contrast, silicon MEMS oscillators are extremely reliable and resilient as shown in the following table.