01 Feb 2012

Silicon Labs claims smallest and lowest power customisable clock ICs

Silicon Laboratories claims to have developed the industry’s smallest and lowest power customisable clock generators.

Available in a 1.7 mm-squared package, Silicon Labs’ new Si512xx clock generator family is said to offer up to 60 percent lower power than competing solutions and is ideal for space-limited, cost-sensitive embedded and consumer electronics such as portable media players (PMPs), industrial metering and monitoring, portable navigation devices (PNDs), handsets, digital cameras and hundreds of other handheld, power-sensitive products.

According to Silicon Labs, the Si512xx clocks are highly customisable devices. The Si512xx clock generators support up to three LVCMOS clock outputs from 3 to 200 MHz in a single device, providing developers with maximum flexibility while simplifying supply chain management.

Each output has four levels of output strength setting, which can be configured individually to match the load and the trace length condition of the board. This is more than twice the configurability of the closest competing product.

The ultra-small Si512xx clocks typically use up to 80 percent less board space than competing clock generator ICs and provide cost-saving replacements for sub-200 MHz LVCMOS oscillators.

By supporting multiple LVCMOS outputs, the single-chip Si512xx clock generators replace multiple surface-mounted crystals and oscillators with one economical device, further reducing board space and BOM cost.

The clocks provide output enable (OE) functionality to achieve even lower power modes in standby or sleep states. They also provide customisable spread spectrum clocking technology to minimize electromagnetic interference (EMI). This frequency modulation technique enables system designers to reduce EMI by spreading clock energy over a wider frequency range, consequently reducing peak emissions at the fundamental frequency and every harmonic.

The Si512xx further reduces EMI and increases system margin for data integrity through an innovative approach to edge-rate slew customization. The Si512xx clock family’s architecture can be factory-customised to support specific spread spectrum and edge-rate slewing profiles, percentages, modulation types and/or rates.

“No other small-footprint clock solution today offers the high level of integration, power efficiency and configurability of the Si512xx clock family,” said Mike Petrowski, general manager of Silicon Labs’ timing products. “Like the rest of our timing device family, these clock generator ICs offer customers the industry’s shortest lead times for custom clocks to help streamline development cycles.”

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