SiTime’s SiRes SiT8002 programmable oscillator

SiTime’s SiRes SiT8002 programmable oscillator

It was Markus Lutz who first identified the need for a more efficient way to package MEMS devices. He had been working for automotive MEMS leader Robert Bosch GmbH and had been asked to start the company’s Research Technology Center in Palo Alto, CA. While working there, he and Aaron Partridge developed a way to efficiently package MEMS, making them look and scale very much like semiconductors.

In the summer of 2002, Lutz met Joe Brown, who was working for MEMS packaging equipment supplier Suss MicroTec, while attending a MEMS focused conference in Hilton Head, SC. The two developed a good friendship, and Lutz invited Brown to visit him in California where he would show Brown his research focus. But it wasn’t until late 2003 that Lutz introduced Brown to the idea of MEMS First. Brown realized that this encapsulation technique could revolutionize the way MEMS were packaged. Brown suggested that they should start a company, and left feeling as if he had seen the future.

One day, as things were starting to get underway with the startup, Brown was playing golf at the Stanford University Golf Course with Professor Tom Kenny, a MEMS expert. Brown asked Kenny if he should involve Kurt Petersen, a world recognized expert whom Brown had known when Petersen was at IBM. Kenny dropped his driver and said “that would change everything.”

Initially, Petersen was reluctant to believe there would be a solution that could compete against quartz, whose position as stability and low-cost incumbent would be very difficult to usurp. But over dinner one evening, Lutz, Brown, Kenny, and Partridge were able to convince him that the technology was going to change an industry.

After several visits to Bosch headquarters in Germany, and a lengthy period of discussing just how the company would form and what its market focus would be, Petersen returned to San Jose International airport one day in early August, 2004, having successfully negotiated the licensing agreement with Bosch that was needed to start up SiTime.

Launched with venture funding in December, 2004, SiTime brought on John McDonald from Cypress Semiconductor to rapidly take SiTime to its initial product introduction as VP of Marketing and Sales. Quickly assessing the innovation’s potential, he knew exactly where SiTime could make a difference in the market. So the SiT8002 was born.

Today, SiTime is shipping 200,000 units a week and plans to have its first million units shipped by October 8.

Richard Comerford