"We have put the right compensation circuitry on our all-silicon CMOS oscillator to generate very high frequencies with good accuracy," said Tunc Cenger, senior manager of product marketing at IDT. "And our added value is that you can integrate inside the package which you can't do with quartz."

IDT delivers its all-silicon CMOS oscillators on wafers before dicing, so that its customers can stack the IDT3C02 on top of their application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) in a multi-chip package, or for ultra-price-sensitive applications, like flash drives, OEMs can affix the IDT die to a chip-on-board (CoB).

IDT has 35 issued and pending patents on its unique compensation circuitry and die encapsulation that hermetically seals its CMOS oscillator to protect it from stray electrical fields and changes in the environment, such as humidity, that had prevented previous designs from achieving 100 ppm frequency accuracy and less than 457 femtosecond phase jitter.

The frequency-trimmed, temperature-compensated, environmentally-stabilized IDT3C02 achieves -140dBc/Hz phase noise by beginning with a 3GHz self-referenced LC oscillator that it divides down to user-programmable range of from 4-to-133MHz. By using no power-consuming phases locked loop (PLL), the the IDT3C02 consumes less than a quarter of the power required by quartz, MEMS and other all-CMOS oscillators--just two milliamps active and 200 nanoamps in stand-by with 100 microsecond start-up--plus can run at any supply voltage from 1.8-to-3.3 volts. The no-moving-parts design, compared to quartz or MEMS, also leads IDT to claim superior shock and vibration resistance for its all-silicon CMOS approach.

The 300ppm and 400ppm parts are now in mass production.

The new 100ppm oscillator, called the IDT3C02, replaces quartz crystal-based oscillators at very thin form factors without the use of any mechanical frequency source or PLL.

It is specifically designed to work with next-generation storage, datacom and connectivity interfaces, such as 1Gb Ethernet, SAS, SuperSpeed USB (USB 3.0) and PCI Express. The product is a low-power, low-jitter replacement to general-purpose quartz crystal oscillators, making it ideal for server and enterprise designs as well as datacom devices with Ethernet ports.

The IDT3C02 generates highly accurate frequencies on chip without relying on a piezo-electric or mechanical resonator.

It's built on a standard CMOS process, has a programmable architecture and supports various configuration options to suit a broad range of applications.

Perhaps most critical among these options is the frequency of operation, which is programmed by the factory and allows for shorter lead times, including unique or uncommon frequencies, compared with traditional quartz solutions.

In addition, the oscillator is designed with an analogue core, which consumes less than 2.5mA (unloaded, typical), and thus offers a lower power alternative to high frequency quartz- and PLL-based oscillators while delivering best-in-class -140dBc/Hz phase noise at 1MHz offset from carrier.

The device comes in an industry-standard quartz crystal-compatible package of 5x3.2mm, but eliminates the need for hermetically sealed ceramic packaging and instead utilizes low-cost and thin-profile MSL1 plastic IC packaging.

It has a 200nA (typical) low power stand-by mode, and fast start-up time of 100us (typical). The combination of these features makes it ideal for power-sensitive designs and allows for frequent power cycling for further power savings.

Because the device contains no moving elements and generates the frequencies electronically instead of using mechanical or piezo-electronic resonance, the all-silicon, monolithic implementation leads to excellent shock and vibration resistance.

It costs 92 cents in 1,000 unit quantities.

“Billions of quartz crystal units are shipped every year,” McCorquodale says. “It’s the de facto frequency reference in the world.” He has found a way to get quartz-level stability with silicon oscillators—first at Mobius Microsystems, his former 6-year-old start-up that began shipping silicon oscillators in 2006, and continuing at Integrated Device Technology (IDT), the global semiconductor giant headquartered in San Jose, Calif., that acquired Mobius in January. IDT put McCorquodale in charge of its Silicon Frequency Control Business Unit, where he continues to refine his silicon oscillator technology, as well as oversee the unit’s operations, including sales and marketing.

McCorquodale is scheduled to present a paper in June on his latest creation, which IDT announced April 29: a stand-alone silicon oscillator that can be assembled with other silicon components—enabling smaller, thinner, more compact products—at the IEEE International Frequency Control Symposium, in Newport Beach, Calif.

An unpackaged timing reference is unique. All quartz references are encased in expensive metal or ceramic packages to increase their stability by protecting them from the environment. Until now, McCorquodale’s silicon oscillators were encased in less expensive plastic for the same reasons. But the new silicon oscillator is bathed in a proprietary coating—which allows companies to combine it with other silicon chips into their own custom packages, essentially assembling the frequency reference in nearly any manner they choose. It took awhile for McCorquodale’s team to find a coating that protected the circuitry and ensured the oscillator’s stability by blocking interference from external electromagnetic fields.

In September, the work done at Mobius earned McCorquodale awards from his two alma maters, the 2009 Recent Engineering Graduate Award from the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the 2009 Young Alumni Achievement Award from the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

McCorquodale’s silicon oscillator, which is approximately a fifth of a cubic millimeter, allows for new kinds of products impossible with quartz crystals, which are typically some 80 times larger in volume than what he has developed.

Moreover, quartz components cannot be assembled and integrated with the same processes as silicon. For example, silicon makes it possible to embed a frequency source into a phone SIM card, allowing for greater memory storage and for data on the card to be transferred to another phone or computer. Right now, most data is stored in the phone itself and lost when the SIM card is switched to another phone. A quartz crystal is too large to fit on a SIM card.

“Quartz is great, but the rest of the electrical engineering world operates in silicon,” McCorquodale says. “The technical community has wanted to achieve this for a long time, but the accuracy, until now, has been poor. Quartz-timed products are stable to 0.005 percent, meaning that the frequencies they generate vary no more than 0.005 percent over all conditions. Our initial silicon oscillators were stable to 1 percent. However, after six years of development, we are currently making products that are stable to 0.01 percent, and can sample products that are accurate to 0.0025 percent, but these products are not yet production-worthy.

“Our objective is to drive the technology to the ultimate limit of frequency stability—or as small a frequency variance as possible. We don’t know yet what that is. It’s an entirely new technology.”

McCorquodale, who grew up in Naperville, Ill., got interested in electronics while playing electric guitar in a rock band in high school. “Electronics improve the quality of music,” he says. For his senior high school project, he built a sound-effects board around a digital signal processor that produced reverberation and other effects when he played. “It works to this day,” he says.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in EE from the University of Illinois in 1997, then spent a year working on oscillator circuits at Hughes Space and Communications (now part of Boeing) in El Segundo, Calif., where he got interested in timing and frequency generation. From there, he went to the University of Michigan and earned a master’s degree in 2000 and Ph.D. in 2004, both in EE. He began tinkering with silicon oscillators at Michigan.

McCorquodale launched Mobius in Ann Arbor in 2004 to commercialize his research, which he relentlessly pursued. “Every day since, I’ve been wondering when I’ll get to nap,” he says. In 2006, armed with US $10 million in venture capital, McCorquodale kept Mobius’ Ann Arbor office but opened a new headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., where the semiconductor industry talent pool was larger. IDT first contacted McCorquodale in 2007 and began serious talks about merging eight months ago. By its merger, Mobius had shipped more than 10 million silicon timing devices to customers but had yet to break even.

“Any entrepreneur starts thinking about maintaining a stand-alone business, but given the market reality and the country’s financial crisis, I became very pragmatic,“ he says. ”It feels like every other company in Silicon Valley is shutting down. The fact that we were acquired and continue to build the products initially designed at Mobius is a huge success.”

The novel anchor manufacturing renders highly reliable anchors demanded by the chronic nature of cardiac sensors. ISSYS’ miniature sensors can also be anchored in two other ways: open heart surgery, and minimally invasive surgery.

ISSYS CEO Nader Najafi said the targets of the company’s products are  cardiovascular disease, especially congestive heart failure; hydrocephalus (high brain pressure); and traumatic brain injuries.

Najafi said that ISSYS plans to start its cardiovascular clinical studies later this year.

Najafi noted that ISSYS’ intellectual property — its patents, know-how and trade secrets — “cover a wide spectrum including MEMS pressure sensors, the overall system, delivery and anchoring, and a variety of medical applications.  Another major competitive advantage for ISSYS is its newly expanded manufacturing facility that is capable of producing tens of thousands of the miniature implants per year.”

Founded in 1995, ISSYS is one of the oldest independent MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) companies in the United States. ISSYS operates a comprehensive MEMS fabrication plant in Ypsilanti.