Acoustic Components

Ultrasound transducers are familiar to many from prenatal diagnostics and therefore accompany our lives even before we are born. Ultrasound is an effective and mostly non-invasive examination method and is one of the safest imaging methods due to the active principle of non-ionizing radiation. In addition to medical technology, the non-destructive testing of internal structures with ultrasonic transducers is also of high interest for industrial sensor technology and consumer applications.

Fraunhofer ENAS has technologies for the production of micromachined ultrasonic transducers (MUT). Each ultrasonic transducer consists of a number of basic cells which are electrically excited to oscillate. These oscillations are emitted into the environment as a sound signal. If the sound waves hit an object, e.g. tissue, the signal is reflected and the MUT -electronics evaluates the data.

Depending on the application, the MUTs can be capacitive (CMUT) or piezoelectric (PMUT). In addition to the technology for manufacturing the transducers, Fraunhofer ENAS has expertise in developing packaging concepts to protect the MUTs in the respective application environments as well as in developing customized electronics and system integration, even for harsh application environments.