Guarding the nation’s temporal cornerstone, TKD forges the “China Heartbeat.”
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Release Time：2025-10-21
Recently, reports about the U.S. attack on China’s National Time Service Center have shed light on a critical frontier in great-power competition: the struggle for control over strategic time resources. National Time Service Center As the time origin of China, the “Beijing Time” it generates is... BeiDou Satellite Navigation System The soul of a nation lies in the synchronized operation of critical sectors such as finance, telecommunications, and energy—sectors that are vital to the country’s survival. Attacking a time-keeping center carries a very clear strategic intent: by paralyzing the adversary’s “sense of time,” it aims to plunge their social operations, military activities, and economic endeavors into systemic chaos.
In this contest over “time sovereignty,” attention has been focused on cutting-edge atomic clocks and satellite signals. Yet, a deeper, more fundamental strategic factor ultimately determines the resilience of this struggle—and that is the crystal oscillator (crystal resonator), which is ubiquitous from advanced weaponry to everyday mobile phones.
Timekeeping system With crystal oscillator
The precise timekeeping of modern society is built upon a hierarchical system consisting of time-distribution systems and crystal oscillators:
Local punctuality is fundamental.
When a device is unable to receive external timing signals, its built-in crystal oscillator becomes an independent “heartbeat,” responsible for maintaining timekeeping. The stability of the crystal oscillator—such as that provided by a temperature-compensated crystal oscillator (OCXO)—directly determines the device’s time accuracy during periods of “disconnection.”
Synchronous calibration is key.
Due to the tiny errors inherent in crystal oscillators and their tendency to drift over time, an external timing signal—such as from the Beidou satellite system—is required to periodically calibrate them, bringing the local time back on track and ensuring that billions of devices maintain synchronized time.
The hierarchical system is a structure.
The entire time network has a pyramidal structure:
Spire: The atomic clocks at the National Time Service Center provide the ultimate time standard.
Middle: Key nodes such as communication base stations receive time signals from satellites and maintain precise timing using high-performance crystal oscillators.
Bottom layer: A massive number of terminals, such as mobile phones, indirectly obtain time and use crystal oscillators to maintain operation between two synchronization events.
In short, crystal oscillators and time synchronization together form the temporal cornerstone of today’s digital society: The time-synchronization system, akin to an “atomic clock” that issues a unified command, distributes standard time globally via satellites and networks; while crystal oscillators serve as the “heartbeat” embedded within each electronic device, providing independent local timing while simultaneously being calibrated by the received time-synchronization signals. Together, these two components create a hierarchical system—“central time synchronization plus decentralized timekeeping”—ensuring precise synchronization across critical sectors such as national defense, communication networks, financial systems, industry, and power grids. This sophisticated time network not only constitutes a vital technological infrastructure but has also become a core strategic resource crucial to both the nation’s economic stability and its defense security.
In this strategic chain that is critical to national security, the strength of terminal timing capabilities ultimately hinges on the precision and reliability of tiny crystal oscillators. Therefore, vigorously developing a domestically controlled, high-end crystal oscillator industry has become not just a technical issue, but a strategic imperative for national security. As a core enterprise in China’s time-and-frequency sector, TKD fully recognizes the heavy responsibility we bear. We are committed to overcoming the technological barriers that stand in the way of high-precision crystal oscillators. Our company’s R&D and production of high-precision, highly stable crystal oscillators—including series such as恒温晶振 (OCXO) and 温补晶振 (TCXO)—are widely used in critical fields like the BeiDou navigation system, 5G communications, and smart grids. These products lay a solid temporal foundation for China’s digital infrastructure development, ensuring that every heartbeat of our nation’s security lifeline is precise, reliable, and perpetually dependable.
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