dependence on temperature is quadratic with the maximum around 25 °C. This means that a tuning-fork crystal oscillator resonates close to its target frequency at room temperature, but slows when the temperature either increases or decreases from room temperature. A common parabolic coefficient for a 32 kHz tuning-fork crystal is −0.04 ppm/°C2: In a real application, this means that a clock built using a regular 32 kHz tuning-fork crystal keeps good time at room temperature, but loses 2 minutes per year at 10 °C above or below room temperature and loses 8 minutes per year at 20 °C above or below room temperature due to the quartz crystal. Crystal oscillator circuits The crystal oscillator circuit sustains oscillation by taking a voltage signal from the quartz resonator, amplifying it, and feeding it back to the resonator. The rate of expansion and contraction of the quartz is the resonant frequency, and is determined by the cut and size of the crystal. When the energy of the generated output frequencies matches the losses in the circuit, an oscillation can be sustained. An oscillator crystal has two electrically conductive plates, with a slice or tuning fork of quartz crystal sandwiched between them. During startup, the controlling circuit places the crystal into an unstable equilibrium, and due to the positive feedback in the system, any tiny fraction of noise is amplified, ramping up the oscillation. The crystal resonator can also be seen as a highly frequency-selective filter in this system: it only passes a very narrow subband of frequencies around the resonant one, attenuating everything else. Eventually, only the resonant frequency is active. As the oscillator amplifies the signals coming out of the crystal, the signals in the crystal's frequency band becomes stronger, eventually dominating the output of the oscillator. The narrow resonance band of the quartz crystal filters out the unwanted frequencies. The output frequency of a quartz oscillator can be either that of the fundamental resonance or of a multiple of that resonance, called a harmonic frequency. Harmonics are an exact integer multiple of the fundamental frequency. But, like many other mechanical resonators, crystals exhibit several modes of oscillation, usually at approximately odd integer multiples of the fundamental frequency. These are termed "overtone modes", and oscillator circuits can be designed to excite them. The overtone modes are at frequencies which are approximate, but not exact odd integer multiples of that of the fundamental