Startup Mobius Microsystems Succeeds, Sells, and Continues to Grow at Publicly-Traded Semiconductor Company
A graduate student at the Center for Wireless Integrated MicroSystems (WIMS), an NSF-funded Engineering Research Center, founded a high-tech start up company--Mobius Microsystems. This company has become a world leader in all-silicon clock generation technology, which is highly cost efficient and can significantly extend battery life in portable and implanted electronics.
The all-silicon clock has the potential to significantly increase the productivity and reliability of a broad range of electronic devices from computer hard drives to cameras and video cards. Mobius has developed all-silicon clock generation products that enable lower power consumption and lower total product cost through greater levels of circuit integration, improved performance, and faster time-to-market.
Integrating ERC research with education and industry generates significant economic benefits. Mobius raised over $25M in venture capital and shipped millions of units of its products based on the original research conducted at WIMS. It was acquired by a public semiconductor company and continues to grow aggressively as a new business unit that employs 23 people.
Michael McCorquodale founded the small, high-tech startup company in 2004 while studying for his doctorate under Professor Richard Brown at WIMS, which is headquartered at the University of Michigan. The company quickly became the world leader in all-silicon clock generation technology.
Mobius Microsystems is an innovator in precision timing ICs, and is the first company to implement highly accurate silicon oscillators monolithically in standard CMOS. This is a significant technical breakthrough in frequency generation, which up to now was served by quartz crystals and crystal oscillators. Mobius' patented CMOS Oscillator technology is a single-chip IC and offers system designers a frequency source with excellent phase noise and jitter performance. In addition to size and frequency advantages over quartz-based oscillators, the programmable CMOS Oscillator also significantly shortens the manufacturing cycle time to best respond to fluctuating demands of the market.
In January 2010, Mobius was acquired by Integrated Device Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: IDTI), a leading provider of mixed-signal semiconductor solutions that enrich the digital media experience. "Mobius Microsystems' innovative technology extends IDT's clock leadership into high-accuracy crystal oscillator replacements, thereby doubling our served available market," the president and CEO of IDT said. The transaction is expected to expand IDT's worldwide timing market by some $700M.
The former Mobius team continues to grow aggressively at IDT and under McCorquodale's leadership as the General Manager of the newly formed Silicon Frequency Control business unit based on the acquisition of Mobius. In October of 2010, McCorquodale told EETimes magazine, "We have already shipped 3.2 million units just in the last quarter." Similarly, although other companies have begun following Mobius' lead, the CMOS oscillator introduced by the Mobius group remains the most accurate in the world. "With its sub-100ppm total frequency error, the IDT3C02 is a major breakthrough in the timing industry," said Fred Zust, Vice President and General Manager of the Communications Division at IDT. "An ideal choice over crystal alternatives, it expands on the all-silicon CMOS oscillators in wafer forms announced earlier this year and extends the IDT timing leadership."
McCorquodale and Brown pioneered a new class of oscillators (Fig. 1) that has now become mainstream. The concept was simple and driven by one question: Could silicon, or CMOS, replace quartz crystals as a frequency source? McCorquodale and Brown pursued the idea for several years and developed an architecture and technology capable of answering the question they had posed to themselves. Since then, under McCorquodale's leadership, Mobius successfully commercialized its products initially by selling design licenses. Those designs are still in full production in 2011 and have shipped in volumes of 10's of millions of units.
