By Stephen Nellis
SANTA CLARA, California (Reuters) -SiTime on Wednesday released a new chip aimed at helping it enter a $4 billion market and land customers in wearable electronic devices.
The small Santa Clara, California-based chip company, which had just over $200 million in sales last year, is one of the few that focus specifically on what are known as timing chips.
The job of timing chips is to keep all of the other chips in a complex electronic device in sync, like a conductor at the front of an orchestra. While SiTime does not disclose its customers, analysts have found its chips in teardowns of Apple iPhones and some of Nvidia’s networking switches.
The chip is dubbed “Titan,” in part as a play on the fact it shrinks a component that was previously the size of a grain of rice to the size of a pinhead. It replaces previous technologies based on quartz crystals with a silicon-based device, which SiTime says will make it less fragile than older technologies.
“It’s basically highly ruggedized, super-low power and super small in size,” SiTime CEO Rajesh Vashist told Reuters in an interview.
Bob O’Donnell, chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research, said the Titan chip could be used in devices such as wireless earbuds, smart glasses and other gadgets where size and battery life are of paramount importance to engineers.
“These are all things that sip on power as it is, but if you sip on it a little bit less, it’s all part of that general trend of miniaturization,” O’Donnell told Reuters. “It’s one of these core ingredients – it’s way down in there, and you’re never going to see it in the dish, but it’s part of what makes it all work.”
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Chris Reese)
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