Higher levels of integration have always played a critical role in advancing computing platforms of all types, lowering power, complexity and cost, while improving performance and efficiency. That said, an area of circuit design that perhaps hasn’t seen enough integration over the years, are clock timing solutions.
Clock timing circuits are a specialty support function of any modern device, server or workstation design. They are a heart beat of sorts for processors, driving core frequencies and keeping them in synchrony with data flow and other parts of the circuit. Historically, complex circuits have required multiple different types of timing products, like resonators and oscillators, to drive clock sources to buffers and generators for clock duplication, division and multiplication.
SiTime is targeting Chorus towards key applications in the modern AI data center, like Smart NICs, PAM-4 400 - 800Gbps high speed communications links, and enterprise switching applications. SiTime’s Chorus family of clock generators is sampling to strategic customers now, with general sampling availability in the second half of this year. All in, Chorus seems like a win-win for AI system design engineers that need precision timing solutions that are also greener, more reliable and ready-made for their applications.