Silicon Labs Adds More Than 100 Clock IC Products to Timing Device Portfolio

Silicon Labs’ newly added clock generator and buffer products are designed to deliver the lowest power, smallest size and greatest frequency flexibility for cost-sensitive applications with timing requirements below 400 MHz. The clock generators use from 20 to 40 percent less power than competing clock products, significantly extending battery life in portable applications. They also have a 30 percent smaller footprint than competing clocks, with single and dual-output package sizes as small as 1.8 mm x 2 mm, making these tiny clock generators ideal for space-constrained portable and consumer applications.

The availability of one to four-PLL clock generator platforms ensures unprecedented flexibility in matching cost and performance to application needs. Flexible clock architectures enable factory customization to optimize jitter performance, functionality and system cost. Silicon Labs’ customer-friendly product configuration and ordering capabilities can accommodate late design cycle changes to clock parameters, enabling mass-customization of timing IC solutions previously unavailable from competing suppliers.

The new clock generators offer best-in-class EMI reduction technology by providing more than twice the configurability of competing solutions for rise/fall times, output impedance, spread spectrum profiles, output skew and frequency. The ease of customizing these signal parameters reduces EMI compliance issues, which helps speed time to market.

Silicon Labs’ expanded timing IC portfolio now includes the following factory-customizable, fixed-function and drop-in replacement clock generator and clock distribution products:
• General-purpose low-voltage CMOS (LVCMOS) clock generators: Programmable clocks offering 1-11 outputs, output frequencies up to 200 MHz and superior EMI performance; used in digital cameras, printers, graphics cards, set-top boxes, HDTVs and home gateways.
• PCI Express (PCIe) Generation 1/2/3 clock generators: Customizable and fixed-function clocks with programmable output frequencies up to 400 MHz, optimized for the PCIe interconnect standard used in consumer, server, storage, IP gateway and industrial systems.
• x86 clock generators for embedded systems: Offering the lowest power consumption for industry-leading x86 platforms, widely used in embedded applications such as storage, blade servers, STBs, home and industrial automation, and medical and test equipment.
• Clock distribution products: Zero-delay buffers and LVCMOS fanout buffers used in servers, routers and switches; temperature-controlled XO (TCXO) fanout buffers for smart phones, tablets and other handheld products; and PCIe buffers for a wide range of PCIe applications.

“The expansion of our low-power, small-footprint clock and buffer product lines significantly broadens Silicon Labs’ timing IC portfolio for cost-sensitive, high-volume applications,” said Mike Petrowski, general manager of Silicon Labs’ timing products. “As the timing market’s leading technology innovator and the foremost ‘one-stop-shop’ supplier of mixed-signal timing solutions, we offer frequency-flexible, customizable, low-jitter clock and oscillator products for every price range, performance need and development schedule.”

About Silicon Labs’ Timing IC Portfolio
Silicon Labs offers the industry’s broadest portfolio of timing devices including programmable XO/VCXOs, CMOS-based silicon oscillators, clock generators, jitter-attenuating clocks, low-jitter clock multipliers, buffers and physical layer timing devices. Leveraging Silicon Labs’ patented DSPLL® and MultiSynth® technologies, these timing ICs eliminate the need for many expensive discrete components while improving performance, minimizing board space and simplifying designs. To help developers get to market faster, Silicon Labs offers an easy-to-use Web utility that allows custom-configuration of XO/VCXOs for a variety of applications; samples ship in less than two weeks, eliminating long lead times associated with custom devices. Silicon Labs’ Web-based ClockBuilder utility also enables developers to customize any-frequency clock generators online, simplifying product selection, device configuration and procurement; lead times for these custom clocks shrink from six weeks to less than two weeks.