A Novel Topology for Process Variation-Tolerant Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers

Abstract

This paper presents a novel architecture for piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers (PMUT) allowing for a drastic reduction in the impact of process variations on the accuracy of the resonant frequency. At the core of this new topology is a toroidal anchoring technique. Measurement results show that inter- and intra-die resonant frequency standard variations can be reduced from 101 kHz to 23 kHz and from 20 kHz to 5.9 kHz, respectively, by using the method proposed in this paper, showcasing devices fabricated using the PiezoMUMPs commercial fabrication technology. From the 16 chips that have been fabricated, each holding 12 PMUT devices of two different topologies, resonant frequency results are presented and analyzed to assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach. In addition, as a proof of concept, the fabricated PMUT are demonstrated to perform distance ranging measurements.