Pinned Boundary Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers

This work reports a piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer (pMUT) with a pinned boundary for enhanced vibrational deformation and emission pressure. In contrast to the state-of-art large-scale piezoelectric ultrasonic transducers, pMUTs have limited output ranges/amplitudes due to their physical sizes which constrains their various potential applications. Using the pinned boundary design instead of the traditionally clamped structure, we demonstrate drastic performance enhancements without any added fabrication complexity. Experimental results show that the operational mode shape matches with simulations and produces a measured 2.5× improvement in displacement and an estimated 3.3× higher pressure output per volt at resonance.