Wide Bandwidth and Low Driving Voltage Vented CMUTs for Airborne Applications

This paper presents a novel method to increase the bandwidth (BW) of airborne capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers (CMUTs). This method introduces a gaseous squeeze film as a damping mechanism, which induces a stiffening effect that lowers the pull-in voltage and improves the sensitivity. The optimal behavior of this stiffening effect versus the damping mechanism can be controlled by creating optimized fluidic trenches of various heights within the gap. The fractional BW can be controlled from 0.89% to 8.1% by adjusting the trench height while lowering the pull-in voltage to less than 54 V at the gap height of 1.0 μm. To achieve the largest sensitivity and lowest pull-in voltage at a given BW, we have developed a multi-parameter optimization method to adjust all combinations of design parameters. A novel multiple hard-mask process flow has been developed to enable fabrication of CMUTs with different cavity and trench heights on the same wafer. These devices provided an equivalent noise pressure level of 4.77 μPa/√Hz with 6.24-kHz BW for 7.6-μm deep fluidic trenches and 4.88 μPa/√Hz with 7.48-kHz BW for 14.3-μm deep fluidic trenches. This demonstration of the wide-BW CMUTs with high sensitivity and low pull-in voltage makes them applicable to medical and thermoacoustic imaging, nondestructive testing, and ultrasonic flow metering.