Silicon Labs Expands Timing Product Family and Adds Over 100 Clock IC Products

Through the expansion of key product lines targeting the mass production market
Possession and enhancement of the industry's most extensive range of clock IC and oscillator products

Silicon Laboratories Inc. (NASDAQ: SLAB, Country Manager Jong-Chan Lee), a global leader in high-performance analog-intensive mixed-signal ICs, announced a major expansion of its timing IC product line to meet strong market demand for cost-effective and programmable timing products. Silicon Labs has added over 100 clock generation and clock distribution products designed for cost-sensitive mass-production consumer electronics, as well as enterprise, telecommunications, and embedded applications. Through the recent acquisition of SpectraLinear, Silicon Labs has further expanded this product line and established itself as the industry's leading provider of timing ICs offering the widest range of mixed-signal, low-jitter clocks, buffers, and oscillators.

Silicon Labs’ recently added clock generator and buffer products are designed to provide the industry’s lowest power, smallest size, and maximum frequency flexibility for price-sensitive applications requiring timing requirements of 400 MHz or less. These clock generators consume 20–40% less power than competitors, significantly extending battery life in portable applications. Additionally, these ultra-small clock generators are available in single and dual-output packages measuring just 1.8 mm x 2 mm, occupying a footprint approximately 30% smaller than competitors, making them ideal for space-constrained portable and consumer applications.

In addition, it is an advantage that one to four PLL clock generator platforms can be selected and used to suit the cost and performance requirements of the application. Thanks to the application of such a flexible clock architecture, customization at the production stage is possible to optimize jitter performance, functionality, and system costs. Silicon Labs features customer-centric product configuration and ordering capabilities, allowing even late customer requests for clock parameter changes to be incorporated into the product design. As a result, mass production customization of timing IC solutions, which was impossible for existing competitors, is now feasible.

The new clock generator provides industry-leading EMI attenuation technology with more than twice as many product configurations as competing solutions in terms of rise/fall time, output impedance, spread spectrum profile, output skew, and frequency. Because these signal parameters are easy to customize, EMI compliance issues can be addressed more easily, allowing for faster time-to-market.

Silicon Labs’ newly added timing IC product family includes clock generators and clock distributors that can be customized during the production phase, as well as fixed-function and drop-in replacement products. Representative products are as follows:

• General Purpose Low Voltage CMOS (LVCMOS) Clock Generator: A programmable clock product offering 1 to 11 outputs, an output frequency of up to 200 MHz, and excellent EMI performance. Used in digital cameras, printers, graphics cards, set-top boxes, HDTVs, and home gateways.
• PCI Express (PCIe) Gen. 1/2/3 Clock Generators: Customizable and fixed-function clock products with output frequency programmable up to 400 MHz to meet PCIe interconnect standards used in consumer electronics, servers, storage, IP gateways, and industrial systems.
• x86 clock generator for embedded systems: Designed for industry-leading x86 platforms widely used in embedded applications such as storage, blade servers, set-top boxes, home and industrial automation, medical devices, and test equipment, and is characterized by very low power consumption.
• Clock Distribution Products: 1) Lag-free buffers and LVCMOS fan-out buffers used in servers, routers, and switches, 2) Temperature-controlled XO (TCXO) fan-out buffers for smartphones, tablets, and other portable products, 3) For a wide range of PCIe applications