Electronics Globalpress Summit Conference - News roundup

Mobius Microsystems of Sunnyvale, California, a spin-out from the University of Michigan in 2004, announced a CMOS IC which generates its own frequencies on-chip at the Globalpress Summit Conference in San Francisco yesterday.

"People say CMOS can't generate its own frequencies, but it can be done and we've done it", said Tunc Cenger, director of marketing at Mobius, "it's the most accurate self-referenced CMOS clock generator that's ever been built."

Mobius calls the chip a CMOS harmonic oscillator (CHO). "It's a precision IC built using a standard CMOS process that can generate all its frequencies itself on the chip without any external device like a quartz crystal or any mechanical device", said Cenger.

Cenger pointed to four big advantages of doing this in CMOS. "If you can do it with CMOS you have no high frequency limit; you can put it into thinner packages; there's no crystal over-tone or power-up failures; you can have multiple frequencies on one device and no mechanical resonators are needed, the only thing moving on the chip is electrons."

Also it is immune to shock and vibration, reduces both EMI and the BOM, and uses less power than a PLL.

The technology is available as an IP and has been embedded in an SOC that has been used in a product which has been marketed since 2006.

What Mobius announced yesterday was the discrete, IC version of the technology which it designates MM8511.

It operates from a 3.3V supply and can be used as a fully integrated clock generator with output frequencies that range from 100s of kHz to 100s of MHz. The initial products will be factory programmed at common interface frequencies in the 10100MHz range.

The device offers a wide selection of Spread Spectrum Modulation percentages from 0 to 6 percent.

The chip comes either in a 8DFN (3x3x0.75mm) package or an 8pin TSSOP (3x6.4mm) package, which is designed to be a 'drop-in' replacement for leading spread spectrum PLLs.

Production samples will be available in July 2008. It costs $1.35 in 1k quantities.  

Mobius Microsystems of Sunnyvale, California, a spin-out from the University of Michigan in 2004, announced a CMOS IC which generates its own frequencies on-chip at the Globalpress Summit Conference in San Francisco yesterday.

"People say CMOS can't generate its own frequencies, but it can be done and we've done it", said Tunc Cenger, director of marketing at Mobius, "it's the most accurate self-referenced CMOS clock generator that's ever been built."

Mobius calls the chip a CMOS harmonic oscillator (CHO). "It's a precision IC built using a standard CMOS process that can generate all its frequencies itself on the chip without any external device like a quartz crystal or any mechanical device", said Cenger.

Cenger pointed to four big advantages of doing this in CMOS. "If you can do it with CMOS you have no high frequency limit; you can put it into thinner packages; there's no crystal over-tone or power-up failures; you can have multiple frequencies on one device and no mechanical resonators are needed, the only thing moving on the chip is electrons."

Also it is immune to shock and vibration, reduces both EMI and the BOM, and uses less power than a PLL.

The technology is available as an IP and has been embedded in an SOC that has been used in a product which has been marketed since 2006.

What Mobius announced yesterday was the discrete, IC version of the technology which it designates MM8511.

It operates from a 3.3V supply and can be used as a fully integrated clock generator with output frequencies that range from 100s of kHz to 100s of MHz. The initial products will be factory programmed at common interface frequencies in the 10100MHz range.

The device offers a wide selection of Spread Spectrum Modulation percentages from 0 to 6 percent.

The chip comes either in a 8DFN (3x3x0.75mm) package or an 8pin TSSOP (3x6.4mm) package, which is designed to be a 'drop-in' replacement for leading spread spectrum PLLs.

Production samples will be available in July 2008. It costs $1.35 in 1k quantities.