of this was that Rakon's core crystal business was in rapid decline, with the total market size shrinking to a mere 10% of its previous size. TCXO development Brent Robinson immediately started looking for new related technologies that Rakon could adopt to turn around the rapidly falling sales. In the mid-1980s, Brent came across a product type known as temperature-compensated crystal oscillators. These were mainly being manufactured in Japan at the time and were used, in particular, in cellular phones. With NEC in Australia looking for a local supplier of TCXOs, Brent committed Rakon to developing a product of equivalent performance to anything that could be sourced out of Japan. By the late 1980s, Rakon was supplying TCXOs to NEC Australia's Melbourne factory. The supply of these products became the main focus of Rakon's operations, and the entire manufacturing process for quartz crystals was revamped in order to support this new technology. The early TCXOs that Rakon supplied were imitations of the Japanese products, but Rakon was unable to replicate the highly automated manufacturing processes that existed in Japan. Also the performance of these early products, although good enough, was not satisfactory to the young Brent Robinson. In order to increase the manufacturing volume, reduce the cost and improve the performance of the products, Rakon developed its manufacturing processes. This was largely due to the fact that there was no local industry to teach the Rakon engineers how to do things, and all manufacturing developments had to be done from a blank sheet of paper. By 1990, Rakon released a product with an, at the time, unprecedented frequency stability of 1 part per million (1ppm) in a miniature package, nearly . GPS market In 1990, Brent's younger brother, Darren Robinson, joined the company as head of marketing. He had been working in Australia in the computer industry and came on board in part to find new customers for the 1ppm TCXO. At around the same time, NEC Australia halted its mobile phone manufacturing and moved its operations back to Japan, dropping Rakon in preference of a local Japanese supplier at the same time. Initially Darren Robinson canvased all the emerging cellular phone manufacturers in order to find a new customer for their TCXO. It soon became apparent that although the Rakon product out-performed anything else on the market, it was too expensive for any of the high-volume applications Rakon was