Application Support and Testing

With combined experience of over 100 years’ in timing products, our dedicated Application Support team is available by phone or email. If you like, we can even arrange to visit you at your lab. We are here to work with you on new designs helping guide your team towards the best products to suit your application.

This might include design guidance on the best product range for a specific high environmental application or to choose the right product for a large volume cost sensitive project. We are happy to discuss everything from PCB layout, manufacturing process restrictions, capacitive load calculations or selecting the best frequency for use with your multiplexer.

We understand the need for prototyping before production and are pleased to provide sample components to support your design work. Sample orders are shipped in a folder marked as such to help your Goods In team and Engineers identify them from production parts. Samples can be supplied numbered and with corresponding test data to aid your calculations.

We can customise our test report to include specific parameters pertinent to your design.

All our parts are 100% tested as part of the production process. If you have experienced some specific failure mode in the past we are happy to create a customer specific test program to give you confidence that your previous failure mode will not occur with parts from IQD.

Because our stock is stored in the same UK location as our test lab we are able to offer testing of components before shipment, even if the parts you are purchasing are standard stock items.

Phase noise and Phase Jitter, Drive Level Dependency, Spurious frequency response, Frequency, Current draw, ESR, Pulling, and many other measurements are available. All of which can be done at any temperature required.

As you would expect, our test lab is temperature and humidity controlled and is ESD compliant to BS EN 61340-5-1, our frequency and time measurements are traceable back to UTC and our test equipment is independently calibrated by a UKAS accredited lab.

We know that some people are using complex software modelling for their circuit design. We can support this by providing measured results for motional parameters which can be used in your models to increase the accuracy.

Temperature change is the most significant environmental effect to cause changes to crystal oscillator behaviour. That’s why, in addition to our manufacturing capability, we have capacity to simultaneously test over 1kpcs in our UK test lab. This gives the ability to give customised the temperature test results on all parts, including stock items.

Crystal ageing causes the frequency of the crystals to change by one or two ppm in the first year. This is a function of epoxy outgassing and stress relaxation meaning that it is a logarithmic decay. This process can be accelerated by placing components in an oven at elevated temperature, by doing so one can remove the most significant portion of the ageing to leave even less change in the field. We run three accelerated ageing chambers in our UK site and can offer customised burn in profiles specific to requirement.

Not sure what the effect of stray capacitance is on your PCB? Unconfident in the actual drive level your IC crystal combination is running at? Need to characterise the ratio of the ESR to amplifier gain? Don’t have expensive FET probes and current probes on site? All these figures can be measured if you send us your PCB. We will also provide a report detailing the measured values and the sensible margins to allow given the deviations in the crystal parameters from batch to batch.

Wander testing as defined in standards such as ITU G.8262 are intended to be applied to the whole system clock. But the oscillator is a key part of the system clock. We can characterise the oscillators for you and give results showing the safety margin from the required MTIE and TDEV masks. This ensures that the oscillator you choose will not be the limiting factor in your clock system.