2 February 2012: Tekron International, a leading developer of precision timing products, today announced that it has developed a GPS clock for use in Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular network base stations.

Tekron developed the clock to meet the needs of a global supplier of telecommunications equipment. “We worked very closely with this company to develop a clock for LTE base stations. I am delighted that this clock is now in production” said Charles Norwood, Tekron’s General Manager.

“We faced a number of stringent technical and commercial requirements” commented Mr Norwood. “Firstly, a fundamental aspect of LTE is that it is a low cost solution; a network operator has to deploy a large number of base stations across a wide area and the cost of the base stations is all important. Therefore our clock had to meet our customer’s low pricing expectations. Secondly, the clock had to be incredibly accurate. Our clock has typically 5 µs of drift in a 24hr period whilst under holdover. In other words, it has near rubidium clock accuracy. The third main challenge was that it must provide this level of performance in extreme temperature and with wide temperature fluctuations. I am very proud that our technical team has managed to develop a clock in such a short time that met such stringent technical requirements at a low price.”

The clock is in volume production and is being installed in an LTE network in Asia.

LTE is the next generation cellular network standard. It gives network operators the speed and performance to manage the expanding requirements of their networks from users of smartphones and other emerging multimedia devices, at a lower cost and with far greater efficiency.

For more information on the clock go to www.tekroninternational.com/lte_gps_clock