ASIC Development for Ultrasonic MEMS Devices

Ultrasonic MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) devices have rapidly evolved in the recent years, opening new potential markets especially in medical, imaging and automotive fields. An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) provides an efficient way to generate and acquire signals from the ultrasonic MEMS device, and is essential for good performance of the ultrasonic system in terms of high sensitivity (RX and TX), low noise, low power consumption and low area footprint.

The Fraunhofer EMFT circuit design group specializes in ASIC development for Ultrasonic MEMS devices. The competences include design, characterization and testing of ASIC interfaces for customer-specific ultrasonic MEMS devices, mainly working with CMUT (Capacitive Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducer) and PMUT (Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducer) devices. Finite Element/Compact modelling (FEM) in Ansys enables us to extract the electrical properties of any MEMS device, crucial for interfacing the customized ASIC. This allows us to develop an electrical equivalent model of the MEMS device to profoundly analyze the ultrasonic system through Verilog-A/Verilog-AMS based simulation and accordingly derive the design specifications for the customized ASIC.

These competences in ASIC development  for ultrasonic MEMS devices are available at Fraunhofer EMFT for your application topics. We look forward to hearing from you!