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.
One of the few companies that concentrate solely on what are referred to as timing chips is the small chip company based in Santa Clara, California, which had sales of slightly more than $200 million in the previous year.
Like the conductor at the front of an orchestra, timing chips are responsible for keeping all of the other chips in a complex electronic device in sync. 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 fact that a component that was previously the size of a grain of rice is now the size of a pinhead is one reason why the chip is referred to as “Titan.” It replaces previous technologies based on quartz crystals with a silicon-based device, which SiTime says will make it less fragile than older technologies.
In an interview with Reuters, SiTime CEO Rajesh Vashist stated, “It’s basically highly ruggedized, super-low power, and super-small in size.” 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.
According to O’Donnell, who spoke with Reuters, “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.” “It’s one of these core ingredients – it’s way down there, and you won’t ever see it in the dish, but it’s a part of what makes everything work.”