On Sun, Jul 30, 2017, at 03:37 PM, Mark Sims wrote: > A friend of mine is an engineer for one of the biggest manufacturers of > clock chips and has worked quite a bit on their clock chips and is quite > familiar with the issues of building consistent ultra low power > oscillators in a production product. Getting nanowatt (and now > sub-nanowatt) level oscillators to do their thing consistently is not > easy. Getting them to do it with customer supplied crystals is a big > thing. Variations by the crystal maker regularly cause previously > working products to stop working. Also they are notoriously sensitive to > PCB layout issues. Older, higher power clock chips don't have nearly as > many problems as the newer ultra low power designs. Competition to see > who can make the lowest power clock chips seems to be one of the biggest > drivers for new clock chip designs.
What's the motivation for this, other than "because we can"? Aren't existing RTC chips capable of running 10+ years from a lithium coin cell already, to the point where the cell's self-discharge is the limiting factor? Is there some application where exceptionally low power use for a clock chip would be of interest? I ask as an interested amateur not familiar with the subtleties of such designs. Cheers! -Pete _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
