Silicon Laboratories expands timing IC portfolio

Silicon Laboratories has announced a major expansion of its timing IC portfolio in response to strong market demand for cost-effective, programmable timing devices.

The company has added more than 100 clock-generation and clock-distribution products designed for cost-sensitive, high-volume consumer, enterprise, communications and embedded applications.

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 400MHz.

The clock generators are said to use from 20 to 40 per cent less power than competing clock products, significantly extending battery life in portable applications.

The are also claimed to have a 30 per cent smaller footprint than competing clocks, with single- and dual-output package sizes as small as 1.8 x 2mm making these tiny clock generators suitable for space-constrained portable and consumer applications.

The availability of one to four PLL clock-generator platforms ensures high flexibility in matching cost and performance to application needs.

Flexible clock architectures enable factory customisation to optimise 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-customisation of timing IC solutions previously unavailable from competing suppliers, according to the company.

Silicon Labs also claims that 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 customising these signal parameters reduces EMI compliance issues, which helps speed time to market.

Silicon Labs' expanded timing IC portfolio now includes the following factory-customisable, 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 200MHz and high 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 - customisable and fixed-function clocks with programmable output frequencies up to 400MHz, optimised for the PCIe interconnect standard used in consumer, server, storage, IP gateway and industrial systems; x86 clock generators for embedded systems - offering a low power consumption for x86 platforms, 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 range of PCIe applications.

Silicon Labs offers a range of 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, minimising board space and simplifying designs.

To help developers get to market faster, Silicon Labs offers a web utility that allows custom configuration of XO/VCXOs for a variety of applications.

Silicon Labs' Web-based Clockbuilder utility also enables developers to customise any-frequency clock generators online, simplifying product selection, device configuration and procurement.

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