Chip component supplier Stathera Inc. today announced that it has closed a $55 million funding round.

Semiconductor-focused fund Maverick Silicon led the Series A deal. It was joined by chipmaker MediaTek Inc.’s venture capital arm, Celesta Capital and several others.

Every modern processor includes an oscillator, a component that generates a signal at specific time intervals. That signal sets the pace at which processing is performed. Without an oscillator pulse, circuits can’t accurately determine when they should start a new calculation, which mixes up the order of computing operations.

The oscillator that a processor uses to coordinate computations is known as its clock. It generates a signal billions of times per second. Processors also include a second, slower oscillator that the host computer uses to track what time it is. The second oscillator generates a signal precisely 32,768 times per second.

Montreal-based Stathera has consolidated the features of a processor clock and a timekeeping oscillator into a single device. The technology enables engineers to equip their chips with one oscillator instead of two, which reduces the associated space requirements by up to 85%. It also reduces power use in the process.

Standard oscillators are built around a tiny quartz crystal. An electric current causes the crystal to vibrate, producing movements that each correspond to a single processor clock signal.

Stathera’s two-in-one oscillator swaps the quartz crystal for a structure composed of single-crystal silicon, the material from which chip wafers are made. That makes it possible to produce the device at chip fabs. When a fab operator adopts a new manufacturing process, Stathera can use the technology to miniature its oscillator. Such advances are not possible with quartz devices.

Stathera says its technology also provides several other benefits.

The vibrations that an oscillator uses to generate signals can damage it over time. Silicon-based oscillators such as Stathera’s device have a smaller mass than quartz devices, which decreases the strength of vibrations and thereby lowers the risk of malfunctions. To further boost its devices’ durability, Stathera places them in a vacuum-sealed enclosure. That isolation protects  oscillators from debris and other sources of damage.

Silicon oscillators are less prone to certain reliability issues than their quartz-based counterparts. However, they experience drift, or a decrease in accuracy, when the temperature of the host computer changes. That drift amounts to 30 signals out of a million every time there’s a change of one degree Celsius. According to Stathera, its oscillator design includes features that mitigate temperature-related drift.

The company’s product portfolio currently comprises two devices. The STA320 is designed to power medical devices, wearables and other low-power systems while the ST156 is geared towards more advanced products such as smartphones. 

Stathera will use the proceeds from its funding round to ship a new generation of oscillators. Additionally, it will start developing a third-generation device series optimized for artificial intelligence chips. Stathera will hire more engineers and go-to-market professionals to support the effort.   

“AI data center performance is increasingly limited not by raw compute, but by how quickly and coherently data can move and remain synchronized across tens of thousands of processors and the networking connecting them – synchronization that must run on precision timing,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Officer George Xereas. “For decades that timing has meant quartz, but Stathera is using semiconductor technology to move this foundational hardware to a new era of silicon.”

Image: Stathera