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.
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