An Air-Coupled Multiple Moving Membrane Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducer With Inverse Biasing Functionality

A novel air-coupled multiple moving membranecapacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (M³-CMUT) with individually biased deflectable plates has been developed. Unlike the conventional capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer, this device cell structure includes an additional deflectable plate that is suspended underneath the transducer top plate. This added flexible plate contributes to the device signal transmission and reception. It is demonstrated that due to the presence of this added moving plate, the transducer is capable of operating under inverse bias condition, where the driving voltage is sandwiched between two grounded electrodes. COMSOL electromechanical simulations were conducted to investigate the influence of the transducer additional moving plate. A set of three individuals and an array of 1×23 M³-CMUT transducers were fabricated using a sacrificial technique and with resonant frequencies ranging from 0.8 to 2.1 MHz. Electrical, optical, and pitch-catch acoustic measurements were performed to characterize the transducers properties under inverse bias condition. The experimental results are shown to be in good agreement with the simulation results for all of the fabricated transducers. It is shown that these transducers are fully functional under both normal and inverse bias conditions without any degradation in the transducer performance.