Aeonsemi Advances Ultra-Compact Timing Solutions for Automotive, Robotics and Physical AI

Semicon Leaders Asia speaks with Foeking Wu, Clock Product Line Manager at Aeonsemi, about the company’s ArcadiumNano™ silicon oscillator family and how ultra-low power, flexible frequency coverage and compact packaging are enabling next-generation intelligent systems.

Q. Aeonsemi is bringing its proven Arcadium™ timing technology into the new ArcadiumNano™ family. What market trends are driving demand for smaller, lower-power timing solutions across automotive, robotics and Physical AI?

• In humanoid robotics, there’re hundreds of joints. Lower clock power at each joint will result in ~ A-level power savings for the entire system. With more features to be supported at each joint, there’re more components involved, so it raises strict requirements on component size miniaturisation.
• In automotive applications, there’s an increasing number of cameras or laser radar to support high-level autonomous driving. With the node number increasing, the contribution of power and size per node is required to be decreased to meet the entire system’s budget

Q. ArcadiumNano™ can support frequencies from 10 kHz to 125 MHz in packages as small as 1.2 × 1.0 mm. How does this combination of frequency flexibility and ultra-compact packaging help customers address increasingly space-constrained system designs?

Nowadays, the crystal-based oscillator solution can get as small as a 1.2 × 1.0 mm package size. However, it doesn’t have full coverage across all frequencies. Only several oscillators with popular frequencies like 24, 25 and 27MHz optimizes the crystal design to fit in such a small package size. Benefiting from Aeonsemi’s timing synthesis technologies, the ArcadiumNano™ series silicon oscillator supports arbitrary frequencies in the range from 10 kHz to 125 MHz in a 1.2 x 1.0 mm package.

Q.The devices use an all-silicon CMOS architecture rather than mechanical resonators. What advantages does this approach provide customers in terms of supply-chain flexibility, customisation, manufacturing scalability and product reliability?

• As mechanical resonators are more sensitive to environmental stresses, they require special manufacturing flows to be well protected. Usually, they need to be operated and packaged in a vacuum environment. For silicon oscillators, as it uses an all-silicon CMOS architecture, it utilizes the scale factor of the semiconductor industry. The manufacturing scalability and supply-chain flexibility are much better than the traditional solutions.
• All-silicon architecture has high immunity to environmental stresses, including shock & vibrations. The devices have sub-10 FIT over 1 billion hours.

Q. ArcadiumNano™ incorporates programmable spread-spectrum clocking to help address EMC requirements without a separate PLL-based clock generator. How can this integration simplify system design and potentially reduce overall bill-of-materials and board-space requirements?

• In many systems, EMC compliance requires either a spread-spectrum clock generator or a PLL-based solution in addition to the reference oscillator. This adds components, board area, power consumption and design complexity.
• ArcadiumNano™ integrates programmable spread-spectrum clocking directly into the oscillator. Customers can select the appropriate modulation settings without adding a separate clock-conditioning device. This helps reduce BOM cost, PCB area and routing complexity, which is especially valuable in compact camera modules, robotic joints and edge-AI systems.
• By integrating the clock source and EMI-reduction function into one device, customers can also shorten their design and validation cycle.

Q. Aeonsemi says more than 50 million Arcadium™ oscillators have shipped with zero reported field-return failures. How important is this reliability track record as the company expands into safety- and performance-critical automotive and robotics applications?

• Reliability and safety are Aeonsemi’s top priorities. More than a slogan or corporate vision, they serve as the shared goal and guiding principle that informs every employee’s work, decisions and commitment to customers. Reliability is especially essential for automotive and robotics applications because timing devices are foundational components. A clock failure can affect communications, sensing, processing and system control.
• More than 50 million Arcadium™ devices shipped with zero reported field-return failures provide strong evidence of the robustness of Aeonsemi’s all-silicon timing technology in real-world applications. This track record gives customers more confidence when adopting ArcadiumNano™ in applications exposed to vibration, shock, temperature variation and long operating lifetimes. It is particularly important as robotics and Physical AI systems move from prototypes into volume deployment.

Q. With power consumption reduced by up to 80% compared with previous-generation Arcadium™ devices and custom samples available within two weeks, how is Aeonsemi positioning ArcadiumNano™ to capture opportunities in the rapidly developing Physical AI and intelligent edge markets?

• Physical AI and intelligent edge systems require increasingly distributed compute, sensing and control. Each subsystem needs reliable timing, but the total power and space budget is limited.
• ArcadiumNano™ addresses this requirement by combining ultra-low power, a very small package, broad frequency coverage and programmable features in a silicon oscillator platform. Up to 80% lower power consumption can provide meaningful system-level savings when many timing devices are used in the same platform.
• ArcadiumNano™ is designed to become a scalable timing platform for the next generation of intelligent, connected and power-constrained edge systems.