The Overview: Tiny Resonators Built for Integration into Edge Devices
Coming in at least 4X smaller than the tiniest quartz-based alternatives, SiTime’s Titan Platform MEMS resonators bring a host of advantages to timing applications: Aside from their miniature physical size, the devices are available co-packaged with SoCs or MCUs for use in demanding edge applications.
Who Needs It & Why: Low Power Draw for Wearables, Medical Devices, and IoT/IIoT
There’s been a steady flow of improvements in MEMS technologies over recent years, not least of which has been manifested in SiTime’s FujiMEMS foundational MEMS technology, now in its sixth generation.
Designers want to apply the low power consumption and precision of MEMS timing devices to connected, battery-powered devices, in which the market demands smaller overall sizes and longer operating periods. This applies to edge devices such as wearables like smart watches, fitness bands and rings, glucose monitors, and smart glasses. Medical devices, e.g., hearing aids, implantables, and biosensors, can also gain from longer batter life.
And then there’s the billions of smart-home and industrial IoT sensors, asset trackers, and other systems that need to be more compact, rugged, and efficient.
Under the Hood: Tight Timing Specs, Ruggedness, and Implementation Flexibility
The Titan Platform MEMS resonators offer two flexible implementation paths. They can be mounted on printed circuit boards (PCBs) for rapid assimilation into a production flow, or they can be co-packaged as bare die with SoCs or MCUs. The latter path eliminates the need for a discrete resonator on the PCB.
How small are the resonators? In their 0505 chip-scale packages (0.46 × 0.46 mm), the devices fill 7X less PCB area than a 1210-packaged quartz device and 4X less than a 1008-packaged quartz part. They're said to require up to 50% less oscillator circuit power and start up 3X faster than legacy devices with lower startup energy requirements.
The resonators provide up to 5X tighter frequency stability across temperatures from –40 to 125°C. And, they're claimed to provide up to 50X more shock and vibration resistance than quartz devices.
Production samples of the 32-MHz Titan SiT11100 are available now. Engineering samples of higher-frequency devices (up to 76.8 MHz) will be available in December 2025.
