RTCs Eye Consumer Products

For applications requiring stand-alone, real-time clocks, the company's latest family of RTC chips is viable for consumer applications such as set-top boxes, GPS devices, energy meters, and MP3 players. They also target computing, medical, and telecom markets. Described as low-power clock/date devices, they integrate two programmable time-of-day alarms and a programmable square-wave output for applications requiring calendaring and time functionality. Address and data transfer serially through an I2C bus and the chips include power-sense circuits that detect power failures and automatically switch to the backup supply. Additionally, the family includes devices with an extra 56 bytes of non-volatile SRAM. Packaging options include eight-pin MSOPs, eight-pin SOICs, and 16-pin SOICs. Prices for the RTCs (1337, 1338, and 1339) range $0.90 to $2.10 each/10,000. INTEGRATED DEVICE TECHNOLOGY INC., Santa Clara, CA. (800) 345-7015.