Bandwidth improvement in a cMUT array with mixed sized elements

A capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (cMUT) is typically fabricated by concatenation of several cMUT cells with identical physical dimensions. If the membrane thickness is kept fixed, the radius of the cMUT determines the center frequency of operation. A smaller radius implies a greater center frequency. Therefore, it should be possible to put cMUTs with different sizes in parallel to get a larger bandwidth at the expense of gain. In this study, we investigate the optimization of the bandwidth characteristics of a cMUT by using mixed size cells. We designed two mixed size cMUT arrays with a predicted optimized fractional bandwidth value of about 155% at 5.4 MHz, and 146% at 8.8 MHz. These values are about 55% and 58% better than what can be achieved with a uniform size array at the corresponding center frequencies. There is almost no loss in the gain bandwidth product when two different sized cMUTs are used in parallel. There is about 9% increase in gain bandwidth product when three different sized cMUTs are used in parallel. It is shown, in this study, that gain bandwidth product and bandwidth can be enhanced by use of mixed size cMUT cells. © 2005 IEEE.