> So what else could it be? Well, at the heart of every electronic device is a clock. Traditionally, these are quartz oscillators, crystals that vibrate at a specific predictable frequency—generally 32 kHz.
Watch crystals run at 32[.768] kHz because you can divide with a binary counter by 2^16 and get 1 pps to drive the Lavet stepper driving the seconds hand.
Watch crystals are also commonly used by MCUs for their RTC (real time, very low power clock), but never used to produce the main clock of a SoC or something like that. Mostly because that'd need an insanely high multiplication through a PLL (higher frequency multiplication ~ higher phase noise). Base clock crystals are typically 20-50 MHz.
Watch crystals run at 32[.768] kHz because you can divide with a binary counter by 2^16 and get 1 pps to drive the Lavet stepper driving the seconds hand.
Watch crystals are also commonly used by MCUs for their RTC (real time, very low power clock), but never used to produce the main clock of a SoC or something like that. Mostly because that'd need an insanely high multiplication through a PLL (higher frequency multiplication ~ higher phase noise). Base clock crystals are typically 20-50 MHz.
Quartz crystals used to be hermetically sealed.