Collaboration on MEMS timing for 5G

Dr Cormac Conroy, Corporate Vice President and General Manager of the Communication and Devices Group at Intel Corporation, stated: “Our collaboration with SiTime on MEMS-based silicon timing solutions will help our customers build leading 5G platforms to best take advantage of the increased performance and capacity that the 5G NR standard brings. Intel’s modem technology and our collaboration with SiTime is helping to enable new mobile and consumer experiences, and enterprise and industrial use cases.”

SiTime’s MEMS timing solutions enhance system performance in the presence of stressors such as vibration, high temperature, and rapid thermal transients. Such stressors can disrupt the timing signal and result in network reliability issues, lower data throughput, and even connectivity drops. In providing MEMS solutions to Intel’s 5G modem business, SiTime’s patented MEMS timing technology helps meet the high performance requirements of emerging 5G radio modem platforms.

Rajesh Vashist, CEO at SiTime, added: “Intel is already building 5G’s future and has the scale to meet 5G’s scope. Our collaboration enables SiTime to align our MEMS timing solutions roadmap with Intel’s 5G platforms. Intel’s expertise in 5G modems, with SiTime’s game changing timing technology, is a potent partnership for future growth and one that enables successful deployment of 5G. As SiTime continues to lead the world in MEMS timing, the opportunities between our companies are growing and this agreement sets us both on a path for continued success.”

5G is a critical element of the new data economy. In the next few years, 5G will fundamentally transform our lives, enabling a smarter and more connected society. From smart cities and intelligent wind farms, to agriculture and hospitals, the Internet of Things and connected infrastructures will generate zettabytes of data from an estimated 50 billion devices, more than there are people on earth.

To realise this transformation, networks must become faster, more agile, and much denser, utilising more equipment. Systems will be deployed closer to connected devices and in uncontrolled locations such as on streetlamps, traffic lights, rooftops, stadiums, and parking garages. In these settings, 5G devices will be subject to environmental stressors such as vibration, high temperature, and rapid temperature changes.

This creates new, complex, and high performance requirements for the timing heartbeat, which will necessitate novel implementations. SiTime’s transformative MEMS timing solutions offer high robustness, reliability, and performance in the presence of such stressors, and therefore could be crucial to the successful deployment of 5G.