MEMs-based oscillators advance in both industry and R&7D

You may recall that one of the finalists last year in EDN’s Innovation Awards was SiTime’s MEMs-based programmable oscillator. In the past year SiTime has been joined by Discera, with both companies counting on MEMs-based technology to obsolete the venerable quartz crystal as the foundation for digital circuits’ reference frequencies. Quartz-based circuits have the unfortunate characteristics of being larger, fixed-frequency, and don’t lend themselves to large-scale IC integration.

Now comes an article in Technology Review on research being done by Prof. Sunil Bhave at Cornell resulting in a silicon microresonator that vibrates at 4.51 gigahertz, the highest frequency ever recorded in a silicon device. The Cornell microresonator

“…reaches the high frequency without compromising signal strength and purity–how sharply tuned the signal is to a particular frequency. Usually, as frequency increases, the Q factor, which is a measure of an oscillator’s stability, drops. Essentially, the Q factor is a measure of quality: it indicates how long an oscillator can maintain a vibration at a certain frequency. A high Q factor means that the oscillations die out more slowly. The higher the number, the better. The Q factor for the Cornell device at 4.51 gigahertz is close to 10,000, which compares well with quartz resonators.”

The research firm WTC is predicting the market for MEMs-based oscillators will reach $140M by 2012, primarily through integrating oscillation circuitry directly into System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions. But WTC hedges when making predictions about MEMs oscillators replacing high performance TCXOs (Temperature Compensated Crystal Oscillators) – a $1B market —   because of the market’s tough specifications for phase noise and temperature compensation.

Nonetheless, with both industry and R&D pushing hard, it looks like quartz’s long run as the only game in town may be winding down.