Design and development of capacitive ultrasonic transducer using silicon micromachining techniques

Ultrasound has many applications such as ranging, nondestructive evaluation, gas flow measurement, and acoustic microscopy. Conventional piezoelectric transducers perform poorly for these applications due to the lack of proper matching layer materials between the transducer and air. Capacitive ultra...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Chen, Zhong Yi.
Other Authors: Lin, Rongming
Format: Theses and Dissertations
Published: 2008
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10356/5533
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Description
Summary:Ultrasound has many applications such as ranging, nondestructive evaluation, gas flow measurement, and acoustic microscopy. Conventional piezoelectric transducers perform poorly for these applications due to the lack of proper matching layer materials between the transducer and air. Capacitive ultrasonic transducers promise higher efficiency and broader bandwidth performance for these applications. The capacitive ultrasonic transducer developed in this project is based on standard silicon micromachining technology. It consists of a metalized membrane (top electrode) suspended above a heavily doped silicon backplate (bottom electrode).