Discera

About Discera

Discera, Inc. operated as a fabless analog semiconductor company, established in 2001 and headquartered in San Jose, California. The company was founded to commercialize pioneering research from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Michigan, with UC Berkeley Professor Clark Nguyen being a key founder. Over its lifetime, Discera raised a total of $59.4 million over four funding rounds, with its first round in April 2004 and its final Series D round in January 2013. Key institutional investors included Scale Venture Partners, Horizon Ventures, and 3i Group.

Discera's core business was the manufacturing and distribution of silicon resonators for the radio frequency (RF) and timing control markets. The company's main offering was its proprietary MEMS (Micro-Electrical Mechanical System) resonator technology, branded as PureSilicon™. This technology was positioned as a replacement for traditional quartz-based solutions, offering lower costs, smaller size, enhanced durability, and a wider operating temperature range. The product portfolio included a wide array of oscillators such as CMOS, LVPECL/LVDS/HCSL, multi-output, I²C/SPI programmable, and high-temperature/high-stability variants. These components served as the timing heartbeat for a diverse range of products in the consumer electronics, mobile, enterprise, industrial, and military sectors, including smartphones, tablets, cameras, GPS devices, and high-speed networking equipment.

The business model centered on providing these MEMS-based timing solutions to electronics manufacturers, promising benefits like reduced board footprint, shorter lead times, and lower power consumption compared to legacy quartz crystal technology. In November 2004, the company demonstrated prototypes of its tunable oscillator, with commercial parts expected by the second half of 2005. By 2006, Discera had entered into a partnership with Vectron International to advance the adoption of MEMS oscillators. A significant milestone was reached when the company announced volume production with a capacity of one million parts per month. In August 2013, Discera was acquired by Micrel, Inc., an analog and power semiconductor solutions provider, in a move to expand Micrel's MEMS capabilities and complement its clock and timing product lines. Micrel itself was later acquired by Microchip Technology in 2015.