Henry Barrow
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley
BSAC Graduate Student Researcher
November 13, 2012 | 12:30 to 01:00 | 540 Cory Hall, DOP Center Conference Room
Host: Clark Nguyen
The goal of this talk is to discuss recent work aimed at developing the smallest possible micromechanical clock oscillator for real-time clock applications. A capacitive-comb transduced micromechanical resonator has been combined via bond-wiring to a custom ASIC sustaining amplifier and a supply voltage of 1.65V to realize a 32.768-kHz real-time clock oscillator more than 100× smaller by area than miniaturized quartz crystal implementations and at least 4× smaller than other MEMS-based approaches. The key to achieving such large reductions in size is the enormous rate at which scaling improves the performance of capacitive-comb transduced folded-beam micromechanical resonators. Notably, the size reduction of the MEMS frequency-setting element leads to reductions in power consumption, allowing this oscillator to operate with only 2.1μW of DC power. This work was presented at the 2012 IEEE International Frequency Control Symposium in Baltimore, MD and was nominated for the best student paper award.
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