This paper gives a detailed electroacoustic study of a new generation of monolithic CMOS micromachined electrodynamic microphone, made with standard CMOS technology. The monolithic integration of the mechanical sensor with the electronics using a standard CMOS process is respected in the design, which presents the advantage of being inexpensive while having satisfactory performance. The MEMS microphone structure consists mainly of two planar inductors which occupy separate regions on substrate. One inductor is fixed; the other can exercise out-off plane movement. Firstly, we detail the process flow, which is used to fabricate our monolithic microphone. Subsequently, using the analogy between the three different physical domains, a detailed electro-mechanical-acoustic analogical analysis has been performed in order to model both frequency response and sensitivity of the microphone. Finally, we show that the theoretical microphone sensitivity is maximal for a constant vertical position of the diaphragm relative to the substrate, which means the distance between the outer and the inner inductor. The pressure sensitivity, which is found to be of the order of a few tens of μV/Pa, is flat within a bandwidth from 50 Hz to 5 kHz.

Based on the ray acoustic model, a new relationship between the radiation force and the acoustic power is studied for a rectangular weakly focusing transducer. The effect of pressure reflection coefficient on this model is discussed. For a totally absorbing target, an approximate closed-form expression is also derived and the performance of this model is compared with that of the far-field integration model. The numerical results show that the agreement is excellent with these two models, which can be both used for correction of measured results, but the formula based on the ray acoustic model can be applied more widely in practice because of its simpler expression. The experimental results show further the effectiveness of the relationship between radiation force and acoustic power for rectangular weakly focusing transducer based on the ray acoustic model. The results presented in this paper are important for application of ultrasound transducers in therapy.