Real-Time Clock Module selection made easy

Frequently asked questions and guidelines

At Micro Crystal, our portfolio encompasses Quartz Crystals, Oscillators, OCXOs, and Real-Time Clock (RTC) Modules for the world’s leading manufacturers of IoT, wearables, consumer products, GPS modules, automotive electronics, healthcare, medical and medical implantable products.

As a recognized industry leader and innovator of extreme-low power, highly accurate, ultra small Real-Time Clock solutions, Micro Crystal stay in close cooperation with customers worldwide from early design-in activities through mass production.

With a range of options that enrich microcontroller-based hardware, the Real-Time Clock Modules developed by Micro Crystal are helping electronic engineers address ever more complex challenges of designs where increased performance and added features are built into smaller and smaller form factor while minimizing power consumption.

By assembling the Quartz Crystal and the Real-Time Clock integrated circuit within a single RTC package, Micro Crystal’s RTCs allow to minimize the footprint. It does not require any oscillator adjustment during OEM’s design phase, minimizing integration constraints thus lowering development cost and time to market. The factory calibration process and the hermetic package ensure high accuracy and stability over lifetime thus high reliability of these devices.

The RTC’s assortment includes RTC modules with I2C or SPI interface and extra functions such as alarms, timers, timestamps, clock output control, external event interrupt (for example for tamper detection), power management or even accurate temperature monitoring.

To simplify the selection process of your RTC module, most of the key questions and features are discussed here and some guidelines are proposed.