SiTime Epoch Platform MEMS OCXO Wins Product of the Year
The Electronic Products – Product of the Year Awards 2023 announced this week that SiTime Epoch Platform™ MEMS OCXO has taken the top spot among 100+ products in the Analog/Mixed-Signal IC category. These awards have been running 48-years strong—a long-standing industry tradition for vetting the best-of-the-best innovations. The award recognizes “significant advancements in technology or its application, innovation in design, or gain in price/performance.” The Epoch Platform MEMS OCXOs are ideal for datacenter and network infrastructure equipment, delivering unmatched performance, reliability, and holdover in real-world conditions. This maximizes service continuity, keeping people and businesses connected.
Launched in late 2023, the Epoch Platform MEMS OCXO disrupts the century-old quartz timing technology. “SiTime’s Epoch Platform changes the game, delivering higher performance and reliability with lower power that was unavailable until now. These benefits are the result of a half-decade of engineering investment and a systems-based development approach that combines MEMS, analog, packaging and algorithms,” said Rajesh Vashist, CEO and chairman of SiTime.
Timing is critical in every network. With each network advancement, timing requirements for synchronizing network nodes becomes more stringent—today's networks must be synchronized within hundreds of nanoseconds or less. In fact, 5G network timing requirements are 10X more stringent than 4G network requirements and this tight synchronization must be maintained during outages. When a network node loses connection to a more accurate upstream reference (often coming from a GPS/GNSS source), the node depends on its local oscillator (often an OCXO) to “holdover” time and maintain downstream synchronization. This is why holdover is so critical, especially in synchronization applications. Without a robust OCXO to deliver consistent holdover in real-world environments, the downstream nodes fall out of synchronization, often leading to outages that can cost operators millions of dollars.
By using the SiTime Epoch Platform, designs can extend system holdover and overcome the long-standing problems of quartz OCXOs which are inherently unreliable and prone to performance degradation in the presence of environmental stressors. Compared to their quartz crystal counterparts, SiTime Epoch Platform MEMS OCXOs achieve:
- 2X performance improvement
- 9X smaller footprint
- 25X smaller volume
- 3X lower power
- 2X holdover improvement in dynamic conditions
MEMS silicon technology is ideal for data center switches and routers, 5G base stations, core infrastructure, and much more. Because the SiTime Epoch Platform MEMS OCXOs deliver better performance, part-to-part consistency, higher reliability, and ease-of-design, they will become the OCXO solution of choice. SiTime is honored to be recognized by Electronic Products as the top Analog/Mixed Signal IC of 2023. As the electronics industry continues to advance, SiTime looks forward to taking on the next-generation of timing challenges, ensuring networking and communications systems run like clockwork.
Related Blog
The Evolution of Precision Timing Solutions
The Epoch Platform OCXO family
SiT5811: ±1 ppb stability, 12-hour holdover, 10 to 60 MHz
SiT5812: ±1 ppb stability, 12-hour holdover, 60 to 220 MHz
SiT5801: ±3 and ±5 ppb stability, 8-hour holdover, 10 to 60 MHz
SiT5802: ±3 and ±5 ppb stability, 8-hour holdover, 60 to 220 MHz