New clock tech has ham application

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Stephen Kangas

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Jun 5, 2025, 9:08:00 AM6/5/25

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As a former electronics design engineer, I still keep up with what’s new via industry rags. This one caught my eye in an article in Electronics Design about a single chip implementation of the new bulk acoustic wave (BAW) technology for more precise, more durable, longer reliability, cheaper and smaller oscillators. Although targeted to automotive applications by Texas Instruments (TI) in their new chip, of course we hams find high precision reference & local oscillators needed for certain digital communications modes. This chip can provide significant benefits compared to the current external 10MHz (and other freqs) reference oscillators/clocks we use, with lower jitter, better precision, smaller size, and lower cost, compared to either quartz crystals or using GPS references. Info on the TI chip here: https://www.ti.com/lit/ta/ssztd77/ssztd77.pdf Look for other semiconductor OEMs to come out with BAW chips before much longer. Perhaps we’ll see them winding up inside our Icom etc radios at some point, or in better/cheaper external standalone reference devices made by hams.