STATEK CORPORATION
- Pioneers in Quartz Crystal Technology
and their influence on LED watches
by Jon Eton, copyright 1999, revised 2003. All rights reserved.
Close-up photo of a Statek Crystal
Close-up
photo of a Statek Crystal in a LED watch module.
All LED watches use a quartz crystal as a time base*. It
is one of the most important components of the watch. Whereas the main computer
(microprocessor) chip could be thought of as the brain, the quartz crystal would
be the heart, providing the electronic pulses that enable these watches to keep
extremely accurate time. It is basically a small piece of quartz in the shape of
a tuning fork or bar, mounted in a vacuum-sealed container. As current is
applied to the crystal, it vibrates at a set frequency (usually 32,768 Hz.),
which is then divided down to a more useful 1Hz. (one cycle per second). This
one-second pulse is then used to count off the seconds, minutes and hours that
give us this accurate timekeeping.
Before most people had ever heard of LED watches,
Statek Corporation was already manufacturing the quartz crystals used in many of
them and leading the industry with a completely new manufacturing process.
About a year ago, through information supplied by a
co-worker, I was fortunate enough to meet Earl Burnett who is Vice President and
one of the founders of Statek Corporation, which is located in Orange County,
California (between Los Angeles and San Diego). When I met him, I was impressed
with his sincerity and down-home friendliness, and since then he has supplied me
with some very useful information about quartz crystals in general and the
history of Statek.
Earl first developed an interest in electronics while
serving in the U.S. Army as a radar operator. After leaving the service in 1956
he attended the University of Oklahoma where he studied electronics and
subsequently earned a Masters degree in Electronic Engineering. In 1962 he
landed a job at Autonetics in Anaheim, California working as an electronics
engineer while continuing his post-graduate studies.
While at Autonetics he
met Juergen Staudte who had previously been employed at Elgin, working on early
electric analog watches and at CTS Knight, an early quartz crystal manufacturer.
Staudte had heard about the new led watches being developed, and had some ideas
for improving the design and method of production of quartz crystals that he
felt would fit right in to that market. He asked Burnett to join him in starting
a new company specifically geared to the manufacture of crystals for use in
these watches, and the two of them along with Staudte’s brother-in-law, Allen
Turner, started Statek Corporation. The company was incorporated in March of
1970 and started actual crystal production about a year later.
Right around 1970, when LED watches were first being
developed, quartz crystals were still fairly large and primarily used in clocks.
The companies working on developing these watches needed a crystal small enough
to allow them to be made in a size comparable to existing mechanical watches.
Pulsar, which was the first LED watch to be successfully marketed, used Motorola
crystals in their watches, but they were about 1/2" long and required their
first models to be somewhat large. One of Staudte's ideas was to make crystals
in the shape of a tuning fork as opposed to the commonly used bar type crystal.
This reduced the size of the crystal by about half, and enabled LED watch
manufacturers to reduce the size of their watches. Also, the shock resistance of
these crystals was improved by mounting them at the closed end of the tuning
fork as opposed to being suspended by small wires like the earlier bar type
crystals. Because of the tuning fork design, eventually the size of LED modules
was reduced enough to allow the manufacture of ladies LED watches.
Although tuning fork style crystals had been known
for sometime, their production was very limited because they were manufactured
using a special time-consuming wire abrasive technique to cut the crystals. This
also made them rather expensive. Another new idea that Staudte had was to use a
photolithographic process to chemically cut several crystals at one time from large slices
of quartz, rather than cutting them individually. This saved a great
deal of time and reduced production costs.
The packaging of the crystal was still another
consideration. The first type of container that Statek used was a round
vacuum-sealed metal can with a glass lid sealed with solder. The glass lid
allowed the crystals to be laser-tuned as close to the actual resonant frequency
of 32,786Hz (or whatever frequency was being used) as possible. After a short
time they realized that using a round can to hold a rectangular crystal allowed
for too much wasted space. They tried several alternate designs and within a
couple of years settled on a rectangular recessed ceramic package (see
picture). This new package, which also used a sealed glass lid, reduced the
size of the finished crystals even more and was less expensive to use than the
metal can. The new design features along with their improved production
techniques allowed them to manufacture a more accurate crystal, on a larger
scale, in a much shorter time, and gave Statek a big advantage over their
competition. Within a short time after starting production, their new crystals
caught on and production increased greatly. Statek crystals were used in many
LED watches including Frontier, Gillette, Timex (early models used a special
frequency), Texas Instruments, Fairchild, Sinclair, Alpha, Microma (Intel) and
Litronix, with Litronix eventually buying the equipment and technology from
Statek to make their own crystals. Litronix crystals were identical to Statek’s
except for the name and part number.
Later on, several other companies began manufacturing
quartz crystals for LED watches, among them being NDK, Toyo, Bulova and
Reeves-Hoffman, along with other brands that were not marked and are therefore
not identifiable. These companies all used the older bar type crystals until
around 1975 when many of them switched to the better tuning fork design, which
is now used exclusively in all quartz watches.
In the late ’70,s the price of quartz crystals began
to drop due to an influx of inexpensive crystals from Asia. Although Statek's
quality was far superior to these imported crystals, most watch companies
decided to use the imports and Statek's share of the watch market began to wane.
They decided at that point to focus on other markets such as computers,
communications, the military, aerospace and the medical field, with a
significant increase in orders for the latter occurring in the last decade or
so. They no longer supply quartz crystals to any watch manufacturer.
Today quartz crystals are manufactured by many other
companies worldwide with an annual production of about one billion pieces, with
two of the largest companies being Seiko and Citizen. Statek has managed to be
successful in this highly competitive market because it has a superior product
line and takes the interests and needs of its customers seriously. Also, because
they make crystals for the high-tech applications mentioned above, their
standards and tolerances must be higher than those employed by most other
crystal manufacturers. They have an ongoing research and development program
and are always working to improving their product line. If you would like to
visit them online, you can find them at
www.statek.com.
I would like to thank Earl Burnett for being so
generous with his time and for supplying me with all the information about
Statek, and Guy Ball for being kind enough to put this article on his website.
Note: Juergen Staudte died in
a plane crash on Wednesday, May 19, 1999 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was a
pilot for more than 40 years and was flying his own plane at the time. He is
survived by his wife and 3 children.
Additional note: Statek no
longer supplies crystals for quartz watches. If you need replacement crystals,
they can be obtained from Jan Crystals (800-JAN-XTAL [526-9825]) or Zantech,
Inc. (800-441-7569).
* A time base is a mechanism
or device that produces a regular beat or pulse creating a measure against which
an accurate timepiece can be made.
Hit the "back" button on your browser to return you to the previous page
or click to go to the The reference section of
www.TheDigitalWatch.com">LED
Watches home page.
For information about this site contact Guy Ball at mrcalc@usa.net
|
