A novel silicon "star-comb" microphone concept for enhanced signal-to-noise-ratio: Modeling, design and first prototype

A novel comb-structure-based, capacitive MEMS microphone concept is proposed, which is expected to significantly reduce viscous damping losses, challenging the high performance of conventional MEMS microphones. To this end, we derived a dedicated, fully energy-coupled and properly calibrated system-level model scaling with all relevant design parameters. It enables to discriminate in detail the impact of the individual components like transducer, package and electrostatic read out to the overall signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) of the microphone and hence, to identify the optimal design of the device. Measurements of first prototypes show promising results and agree very well with simulations demonstrating the predictive power of the model w.r.t. to further optimization.