Silicon Labs' New Chip: Pricier Than the Old Ones

When Silicon Laboratories (SLAB) announced it was selling its handset chip business, we said it left the company with few options. The main one is to make a whole lot more of the chips that don’t go into cell phones.

Silicon Laboratories Inc., a leader in high-performance, analog-intensive, mixed-signal ICs, today announced the industry’s first jitter-attenuating clock multiplier IC that generates any output frequency from any input frequency with 0.3 picosecond jitter performance.

If you don’t know what that means, you’re in good company cause we don’t either. What we do know is that the pricing for the new chip is significantly higher than that of most Silicon Labs products.

The Si53xx family consists of four any-rate clock multipliers (Si5322, Si5325, Si5365 and Si5367) and five any-rate clock multipliers/jitter attenuators (Si5316, Si5323, Si5326, Si5366 and Si5368). The Any-Rate Precision Clock family is available now with pricing from $12.10 to $72.45 in quantities of 1K.

By comparison, their 8-bit MCU starts at $0.45, while an AM/FM receiver goes for $4.87. So, while the volume for the clock multiplier may be much lower than those of other product lines, it will take far fewer of them to make an impact on the company’s revenue growth.