Use of Supporting Post Width to Increase the CMUT's Resonant Frequency

A new method is proposed to increase the resonant frequency of a Capacitive Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducer (CMUT) device while keeping the radii unchanged for devices fabricated by sacrificial release (SR) method. The resonant frequency of a CMUT cell is determined by the properties of the membrane such as the Young's modulus, membrane dimensions and effective membrane mass. Effective Young's modulus is used to calculate the resonant frequency of CMUT fabricated by SR method. The supporting post structure will affect the boundary conditions at the edge of the CMUT membrane and in turn affect the deflection together with the effective Young's modulus of the membrane. The perturbation method is used to derive the solution for the governing von Kármán equations. The results show that the thicker is the supporting post width, the higher is the resonant frequency. This method can also be used to simplify the mask design and CMUT fabrication process.