Cost-Effective Strategy for Developing Small Sized High Frequency PMUTs Toward Phased Array Imaging Applications

This article presents the development of small sized piezoelectric micromachined ultrasound transducer (PMUT) with cost effective fabrication process. Improved ultrasound imaging quality requires small sized, high frequency and high performance PMUT cell and further high density arrays. Fabrication with currently well developed and cost effective sacrificial process benefits their mass production and application. To determine small sized AlN PMUT cell, commonly reported elastic layer materials including Si, Si3N4, SiO2 are compared by mathematic derivation under the same stack thickness and device frequency. SiO2 has the smallest Young modulus and it serving as elastic layer can yield the expected one. Arranging SiO2 layer at the top of the device is compatible with phosphor silicate glass (PSG) sacrificial manufacturing process for cost effective fabrication. This fabrication strategy further downsizes cell size since extra device protection layer is omissible. We make 12MHz PMUT linear arrays with cell diameter, thickness and element pitch to be
$40~\mu \text{m}$
,
$1.9~\mu \text{m}$
and
$120~\mu \text{m}$
. Their electrical and ultrasound results are quite uniform at both device and wafer levels. One PMUT line with 20 parallelly connected units can produce pulse-echo signal with over 25dB SNR at 10mm distance. Lateral and axial ultrasound imaging resolutions of ~1 mm and ~0.3 mm are obtained in practical verification. These indicate the good ultrasound performance of our developed PMUT array. Plus the advantages of small size and cost effective fabrication, using SiO2 elastic layer and arranging it at the top of the device is a competitive strategy to develop phased array PMUTs. [2022-0184]