Dr. Michael McCorquodale
Chief Technical Officer and Founder
Mobius Microsystems

Thursday, October 22, 2009, 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Frequency control and generation are ubiquitous in electronic systems and support functionality ranging from carrier synthesis to timing instructions in microprocessors. The de facto frequency reference in such systems is the piezoelectric quartz crystal oscillator, the development of which can be traced back to 1919. Quartz has maintained its dominant position in the industry for the past 90 years because it enables stable, accurate and low noise frequency references to be generated at low cost through economies of scale. Today, billions of quartz crystals are manufactured every year. An overview of the quartz manufacturing process will be presented along with the typical performance requirements for frequency references in electronic systems. It will be shown that quartz cannot be integrated into silicon and is a discrete component that occupies a non-negligible footprint in such systems. Further quartz is approaching its limits to scaling form-factor, frequency and cost, thus not meeting market demands.

Consequently, much recent research and commercial activity (including almost $200M of private investment) has focused on developing integrated silicon technologies capable of replacing quartz. These approaches include oscillators referenced to microresonators based on a MEMS manufacturing process and our work, at Mobius Microsystems, in precision self-referenced solid-state oscillators utilizing a standard CMOS manufacturing process. The circuit-level architecture of Mobius’ self-referenced solidstate oscillators will be motivated and presented in detail. Further, production challenges and solutions will be discussed along with device reliability. Performance benchmarks will be presented for all technologies where it will be shown that both MEMS and CMOS oscillators now rival quartz on most performance dimensions while meeting the performance requirements for a broad range of applications. Yet, and despite these achievements, the product embodiment, scalability and cost structure of these technologies are likely to be the primary determinants of success in displacing quartz. These factors will be discussed while highlighting the advantages and flexibility afforded by the solid-state frequency references we have developed at Mobius. The seminar will conclude with thoughts on how the frequency control landscape may change in the coming years as these emerging technologies become mainstream.

Dr. Michael S. McCorquodale is the CTO and founder of Mobius Microsystems, an analog semiconductor device company based in Silicon Valley. Mobius was founded based on Dr. McCorquodale’s research at the U. of Michigan in precision analog integrated circuits for frequency generation and quartz replacement. On that work, he has published over 25 technical articles and is an inventor on over 30 issued and pending U.S. patents. Founded in 2004, Dr. McCorquodale led Mobius as its CEO for two years, secured the first design-wins and oversaw the design of Mobius' first product, which has shipped over 10 million units to date. For those efforts, Governor Jennifer Granholm awarded Mobius for the Largest High-Tech Job Creation in the State of Michigan in 2005. In 2006, the Small Business Association awarded Dr. McCorquodale and Mobius for developing the Innovation of the Year in Michigan. Also in 2006, the Fabless Semiconductor Association recognized Mobius as 1 of 3 nominees for the Start-up to Watch Award. In 2009, EDN recognized Mobius' all-silicon spreadspectrum clock generator as one of the "Hot 100 Products" of 2008. In recognition of these accomplishments, Dr. McCorquodale received the Young Alumni Achievement Award from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Alumni Board at the U. of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign and the Recent Engineering Graduate Award from the College of Engineering Alumni Society Board at the U. of Michigan. Dr. McCorquodale earned the B.S.E. degree with honors from the U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the M.S.E and Ph.D. degrees from the U. of Michigan, all in Electrical Engineering.