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.