Towards high fidelity silicon microphones: Evaluating the potential of industrial microsystems applying tailored system-level models

The benefits of a modular, tailored system-level modeling approach, which combines lumped with distributed models, are demonstrated for an industrial capacitive silicon microphone. The performance of such microphones is determined by distributed effects like viscous damping and inhomogeneous capacitance variation across the membrane as well as by system-level phenomena like package-induced acoustic effects and the impact of the electronic circuitry for biasing and read-out. The proposed modeling approach provides maximum insight into the device and system operation while keeping the computational expense low. All relevant figures of merit are covered by the presented model. Hence it enables to evaluate the potential of optimizing silicon microphones towards high fidelity applications.