SANTA CLARA, California, Sept 17 (Reuters) - SiTime ( SITM )

on Wednesday released a new chip aimed at helping it

enter a $4 billion market and land customers in wearable

electronic devices.

The small Santa Clara, California-based chip company, which

had just over $200 million in sales last year, is one of the few

that focus specifically on what are known as timing chips.

The job of timing chips is to keep all of the other chips in

a complex electronic device in sync, like a conductor at the

front of an orchestra. While SiTime ( SITM ) does not disclose its

customers, analysts have found its chips in teardowns of Apple ( AAPL )

iPhones and some of Nvidia's ( NVDA ) networking

switches.

The chip is dubbed "Titan," in part as a play on the fact it

shrinks a component that was previously the size of a grain of

rice to the size of a pinhead. It replaces previous technologies

based on quartz crystals with a silicon-based device, which

SiTime ( SITM ) says will make it less fragile than older technologies.

"It's basically highly ruggedized, super-low power and super

small in size," SiTime ( SITM ) CEO Rajesh Vashist told Reuters in an

interview.

Bob O'Donnell, chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research, said

the Titan chip could be used in devices such as wireless

earbuds, smart glasses and other gadgets where size and battery

life are of paramount importance to engineers.

"These are all things that sip on power as it is, but if you

sip on it a little bit less, it's all part of that general trend

of miniaturization," O'Donnell told Reuters. "It's one of these

core ingredients - it's way down in there, and you're never

going to see it in the dish, but it's part of what makes it all

work."