Founded in 1956 in San Jose, California, Symmetricom® became the world's leading source of highly precise timekeeping technologies, instruments and solutions. The company provided timekeeping in GPS satellites, national time references, and national power grids as well as in critical military and civilian networks.
Symmetricom was sold to Microsemi in November 2013.
Small Cell Products
Symmetricom products can be found at the heart of mobile networks, providing the primary reference sources from which timing throughout the network is derived.
These include PTP master clocks, to drive IEEE 1588v2 phase synchronisation and NTP master clocks used for frequency synchronisation in residential femtocells.
Symmetricom's SoftClock software was adopted by many residential and some enterprise small cell vendors. This runs as a client onboard small cells, acquiring clock signals from multiple sources (e.g. GPS, IEEE 1588 etc.) and generating a stable and accurate onboard clock.
Small Cell product evolution
In January 2012, Symmetricom launched TimeProvider 5000 NTP master clock, capable of supporting 120,000 transactions per second and suitable for mass market femtocell deployments scaling into the millions of units.
During 2012, the SoftClock product evolved into an eco-system with a growing range of partners. Those announced in November 2012 included Node-H, Cavium, Contela, Mindspeed, CS Corporation and Rakon.
The TimeProvider 2700 and 2300 Edge Master Clocks were launched Feb 2013 bringing the clock source products used closer to the edge of the network (e.g. installed at aggregation hubs), to provide frequency and phase timing for nearby small cells.
SoftClock eco-system continued to expand to include several LTE small cell vendors and oscillator designs, with announcements of new partners Pletronics (Feb 2013), Qucell, SK Telesys and Vectron (May 2013)
Symmetricom was acquired by Microsemi in November 2013.
