DARPA wants microscopic atom clocks on chips Pentagon boffinry chiefs have announced that they'd like a very small, super-accurate atomic clock, so small that one day you might build it on a chip. Apparently, they would like to mount these nano superclocks inside the heads of their planned spy legion of brainchipped cyborg zombie insects. The Chip-Scale Atomic Clock ( …
Quartz crystals are good at doing about 1 to 40MHz. PC clocks go at 32KHz to reduce power and hence the cost of the backup battery. The frequency of quartz crystals varies with temperature, some more than others. You get what you pay for. The crystal circuit also includes the PCB, a few capacitors an a chip. Variations in these components add a small error to frequency. Many years ago, that was fixed by adding a small variable capacitor, but that costs some money to add, and more to set correctly.
If you want you PC to know the right time, use some network time protocol software.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntpd
Still looking for a clock that reads either: "Yes, there is time." or "No, there isn't."
The first thing to say is how misleading the hype is on size & accuracy of Chip-Scale Atomic Clocks. The players in this field always photograph the unpackaged devices because they look small. But to thermally stabilize them, the vacuum packaging they require is pretty large. Second, there are tricks with thermally stabilized multi-mode quartz oscillators & contactless packaging that get you "atomic clock" accuracy in that technology for a fraction of the cost, power consumption & size.
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