Anyone know anything about crystal oscillators?

[pX]

I am doing a project involving a very small (100um) piezoelectric motor. We require four phases of a sin wave to drive the stator arms. I have a circuit designs that will split 1 AC signal into 4 phases of itself (polyphase filter, usually used for quadrature generation). I have been assuming I will just use some outside AC signal source, but then thought it'd be neat to just have it in the package as well (so you just have to provide DC 5V). I have absolutely no experience with crystal oscillators, but I know they are made around the frequency I need (.8-1.6MHz). Are using them as simple as powering them and then just wiring up the output to the input of my chip?
This is a purely theoretical (at this point at least) project, so I am not too worried about any of the ramifications of using it, but more of a "yeah it would work" or a "no it's not that simple, you have to provide circuitry for the crystal" type answer.

 

[shekondar]

You can get either kind - an oscillator contains all of the circuitry, and will give you a TTL square wave output. These come in a 4-pin package. The output is usually a fairly ugly square wave (they're usually used with microprocessors, so the output just has to be fairly close to a square wave for the micro to work).

The other kind is just a crystal (2-pin package) - these require external circuitry.