SiTime, the MEMs-based oscillator company seeking to replace quartz-based oscillators, has moved into volume production.
The company uses Jazz Semiconductor as a foundry and, as it moves from the development stage of the company into the production stage, it has replaced its CEO, Dr Kurt Petersen, a MEMS specialist, with Rajesh Vashist, a semiconductor executive whose brief is to ramp production, and take the company to IPO, probably in 2009. Vashist started last month.
The company has also cracked the key goal of developing an integrated process for both the MEMS and CMOS sides of the manufacturing process. After seven masking stages to implement the MEMS part of the product, the wafer proceeds to have the CMOS masking layers added.
Asked what effect the new integrated process would have on SiTime’s product line, John McDonald, vice-president of marketing and sales at SiTime, replied: “I don’t want to get into that today, it would be too much of a shock for the industry.”
The integrated process is ready for development now, but won’t be used for commercial product until mid-2009. The first products on the integrated process will be run at Jazz.
The company is already producing an oscillator that is 370 microns thick which allows high speed data products to enter into height-restricted applications like credit cards and the like. Called the SiT800UT, it is due for general sampling in December.
It has a SiRes MEMS resonator, called SAT0100, which is 140 microns thick measuring 0.8 x 0.6mm, and has a low jitter programmable oscillator, called SiT8102, which claims a performance six times better than the nearest competition. SiTime can programme its products to any frequency a customer wants, in three days.
SiTime was a spin-off from Bosch which holds a large chunk of its equity. It is shipping 300,000 parts a week on eight inch SoI wafers which can hold 50,000 resonators each.