Reliability of Silicon Resonator Oscillators

Low-cost, CMOS oscillators with miniaturized silicon-based MEMS resonators have been out of research laboratories for high volume production. Silicon resonators not only cover all the size reduction roadmaps of quartz crystals, but also lead to a fully-integrated oscillator solution in the near future. The major concerns about silicon resonators are their reliability, including frequency stability over temperature cycling, aging, vibration operation, and shock resistance. This paper demonstrates, for the first time, reliability testing results based on volume manufacturing silicon based oscillators