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Success Story: Chip-Scale Atomic Clock (2020) (nist.gov)
41 points by fnord77 on Jan 2, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments


It seems you can actually buy these things for single-digit thousands of dollars!

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14830

https://www.mouser.be/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/090...

That puts them in the price range of handmade swiss mechanical wristwatches.

Anyone walking around with one strapped to their wrist yet?


Richard Hoptroff was prototyping the idea of a wrist watch [1], though the company pivoted into networking equipment later on.

- [1] https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/richard-hoptroffs-atomic-w...


High power consumption though at 5 watts and even more at warmup.


The CSAC is specified for operation at < 120 mW (< 140 mW at warmup) so one could in principle build a novelty watch with it. However, a standard quartz movement with daily sync to GPS would outperform it at a thousand times lower power consumption.


Keeping it charged and synchronized would have to be part of the art project / status symbol. It would only take one rich person with a genuine interest in timekeeping technology to make this happen. Their servants could bring them a steady stream of batteries... or carry a power cord behind them like a wedding gown.


I’d like a smaller version of this put into a wristwatch with a radioisotope power supply, an ISO-8601 date/time readout, and a built in calculator for measuring time dilation effects with my spouse. A laser pointer would be cool too.


Accurate time is what makes Google Spanner (global SQL database) work. Hope others start implementing easy global consistency with this.

> ...enables clients of Cloud Spanner to perform consistent reads across an entire database (even across multiple Cloud regions) without blocking writes.

https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/true-time-external-con...




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