SiTime releases new chip geared toward wearable devices

By Stephen Nellis

SANTA CLARA, California (Reuters) -SiTime on Wednesday launched a brand new chip geared toward serving to it enter a $4 billion market and land prospects in wearable digital gadgets.

The small Santa Clara, California-based chip firm, which had simply over $200 million in gross sales final yr, is likely one of the few that focus particularly on what are referred to as timing chips.

The job of timing chips is to maintain the entire different chips in a fancy digital gadget in sync, like a conductor on the entrance of an orchestra. While SiTime doesn’t disclose its prospects, analysts have discovered its chips in teardowns of Apple iPhones and a few of Nvidia‘s networking switches.

The chip is dubbed “Titan,” partly as a play on the actual fact it shrinks a element that was beforehand the scale of a grain of rice to the scale of a pinhead. It replaces earlier applied sciences primarily based on quartz crystals with a silicon-based gadget, which SiTime says will make it much less fragile than older applied sciences.

“It’s basically highly ruggedized, super-low power and super small in size,” SiTime CEO Rajesh Vashist advised Reuters in an interview.

Bob O’Donnell, chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research, stated the Titan chip might be utilized in gadgets akin to wi-fi earbuds, sensible glasses and different devices the place measurement and battery life are of paramount significance 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 advised 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)