Silex Microsystems, a pure play MEMS foundry, offers a high density through silicon via technology that enables MEMS designs with significantly reduced form factor. The Through Silicon Via (TSV) process developed by Silex offers sub 50 μm pitch for through wafer connections in up to 600 μm thick substrates. Silex via process enables “all silicon” MEMS designs and true "Wafer Level Packaging" fe...

This report presents a tutorial of fundamental array processing and beamforming theory relevant to microphone array speech processing. A microphone array consists of multiple microphones placed at different spatial locations. Built upon a knowledge of sound propagation principles, the multiple inputs can be manipulated to enhance or attenuate signals emanating from particular directions. In thi...

Micromachining and micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) technologies can be used to produce complex structures, devices and systems on the scale of micrometers. Initially micromachining techniques were borrowed directly from the integrated circuit (IC) industry, but now many unique MEMS-specific micromachining processes are being developed. In MEMS, a wide variety of transduction mechanisms ca...

We present a method to combine standard and throat microphone signals for noise-robust speech recognition. Our approach is to extend the probabilistic optimum filter (POF) mapping algorithm to estimate standard microphone clean speech feature vectors from both microphones’ noisy speech feature vectors. We tested the proposed approach in two noisy speech recognition tasks. In the first task we u...

Microphone arrays are central players in hands-free speech interface applications. The main duty of a microphone array is capturing distant-talking speech with high quality. A microphone array can acquire the desired speech signals selectively by leading the beampattern towards the desired speaker. The foreseen application of ubiquitous sensing motivated by the abundance of microphone-embedded ...

RF/microwave MEMS technology. Part one begins with a brief discussion of RF/microwave system requirements, and then introduces the enabling potentialities of the MEMS arsenal to meet these requirements. In particular, MEMS fabrication techniques are addressed, and fundamental components, including inductors, varactors, resonators and transmission lines, as well as the design/ CAD paradigm, are ...

MEMS components by their very nature have different and unique failure mechanisms than their macroscopic counterparts. This paper discusses failure mechanisms observed in various MEMS components and technologies. MEMS devices fabricated using bulk and surface micromachining process technologies are emphasized.