SiTime, which makes CMOS MEMS replacements for quartz crystal resonators and oscillators, has started its first manufacturing run and plans to have made a million units by the end of the year.
“We’re looking for applications in the one to 10 million volume range. Very high volume applications are more appropriate to us,” said John McDonald, SiTime’s v-p of marketing,
With that in mind, SiTime has priced its development kits in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range.
The company said that one lot of 25 eight inch wafers produces 1m units made in 0.18µm geometry.
SiTime licenses its technology from Bosch of Germany which is a venture capital backer of the company. It raised its Series B funding round in May 2006. Under the terms of its license agreement with Bosch it can use the MEMS technology only to make resonators and oscillators.
“The future of quartz crystal is to be integrated in silicon,” said McDonald, “it allows ultra small oscillators and resonators and complete timing solutions without quartz at a comparable price. It allows one or more resonators to be integrated with standard CMOS”.
The quartz crystal market is a 9 billion unit market with a 33 cent average selling price worth a total of $3.3bn, and SiTime reckons its all-silicon quartz resonators are small enough and cheap enough to address half the current quartz market.
The company’s SiT0100 resonator is 0.8mm high, 0.6mm wide and 0.15mm thick. It can withstand 30,000g's of shock. “As high as normal test equipment will run,” said McDonald.