Dr. Gary Elko

More than 2 billion microphones are produced annually, a rate that is rapidly increasing due to the growth in wireless communication devices. The electret microphone invented in the early 60's makes up the bulk of this production. With the desire for more functionality as well as smaller size, MEMS microphones are now being proposed to become the microphone of choice for consumer audio applications. There are two major application areas driving the interest in MEMS microphones: hearing aids, where size and integration with digital signal processing are important; and consumer devices, where there is interest in reducing costs by integrating a complete systems solution on an integrated circuit. The use of standard semiconductor processing to realize novel mechanical-acoustical devices, integrated with digital signal processing, enables one to build new acoustic front-end systems that offer better acoustic performance on new mobile devices. In this talk, Dr. Elko will review the basics of MEMS microphone design and fabrication and discuss some of the major design issues that are unique to these very small devices.