Array design of piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers with low crosstalk and high emission performance

This article presents a resonant cavity-based array design for piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers (PMUTs). The cavity depth is designed to ensure that its open end achieves a considerably smaller acoustic impedance than the surrounding PMUT cells. The interference acoustic wave generated between every two adjacent PMUT cells at the near surface of the array will take an easy path down to the cavity bottom. As such, the crosstalk effect among different adjacent cells in the array can be largely reduced. An equivalent circuit model of the proposed array is established for its design and optimization. In addition, the solutions for circuit parameters in the electromechanical domain are analytically derived and verified via FEM simulations. Given the low crosstalk effect achieved by the proposed array design, the output sensitivity of the proposed PMUTs can be improved by 259% compared with the traditional PMUTs with a high distribution density of the same size. The cavity-based array design and its model can be used for further advanced PMUT cell structures in other arrays to improve their performance.