How digital watch works?

Question

They are selling nearly for 20 -30 Rs in India which comes around 50 cents in USD. What kind of materials made the digital watch so inexpensive?

Answer 1

In a quality electronic watch, the time pacing element is typically a quartz crystal. In a cheap watch the time pacing element is an oscillator and a phase lock loop (PLL) circuit all printed on a silicon chip. The output of the PLL is a stream of on/off pulses of a controlled frequency. The processing electronics, all printed on the same tiny silicon chip, counts the pulses into seconds, minutes, and hours.

It is cheap because they can print many of those relatively simple and slow-running chips using large transistor sizes on smaller silicon wafers. Using relatively larger feature sizes on smaller wafers salvages the outdated semiconductor foundry processing technologies and reuses the fully depreciated capital automation equipment.

Answer 2

Mass production of the simple silicon chip that runs for a year on a watch battery. Compared to a computer's CPU, the Central Processing Unit on a digital watch (the chip) is extremely simple and very small. Mass production is the answer to your question.

Answer 3

As mentioned, Labor and Plastic drop the cost. I remember when 64 MB of RAM for a computer was about $80, I think now, well, I thinking, OK well the smallest I have seen it 128 MB for $16. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820134176
Labor is the #1 in cost, followed by materials.

Answer 4

Plastics. Ask China for labor rates.