14 DAY TRIAL // Akustica, a pioneer in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology, announced at the Globalpress Electronics Summit the availability of Akustica Microphone Chips, the first single-chip microphones on the market.
The Akustica Microphone Chips are small, thin, light devices designed to replace the Electret Condenser Microphone (ECM), a fifty-year-old technology that has been used in billions of portable electronic devices.
Most of the microphones integrated into PCs, mobile phones, PDAs, Bluetooth headsets and the like are made using the traditional analogue coil-and-magnet technique or capacitors. Digital-output versions - so-called microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) - made using the same lithography processes used to design CPUs, GPUs and memory but with microscopic moving parts, are becoming more and more common. However, since they're made using customized fabrication processes, they're expensive.
Akustica's Microphone Chips also offer numerous benefits to consumer electronics manufacturers. Because of their small size and surface-mountable design, Akustica's Microphone Chips are ideally suited to space-constrained consumer electronics devices that are manufactured in high volumes.
Its CMOS MEMS technology is an industry first in both the new products it enables and the fabrication methods by which those products are manufactured, and its Microphone Chip: The AKU2000 is a surface-mountable, monolithic device that provides high-quality voice input for consumer electronics applications. The AKU2000 is a digital-output silicon microphone that is optimal for use in microphone array applications requiring a high of degree noise immunity.