Infineon Technologies AG (FSE: IFX / OTCQX: IFNNY) will enter the packaged silicon microphone market to meet market demand for high-performance, low-noise MEMS microphones. The analog and digital microphones are based on Infineon ’s dual-backplane MEMS technology, which stands out with a 70 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). At the same time, the microphone has very low distortion at 135 dB sound pressure level (SPL)-10%. This microphone is packaged in a 4 mm x 3 mm x 1.2 mm MEMS package, making it ideal for high-quality recording and far-field speech capture applications.

Dr. Roland Helm, senior director of Infineon's power management and diversified markets division and head of the sensor product family, said: "This is an expansion of the mature high-capacity bare-chip MEMS and ASIC business that we are working with global packaging partners. We will continue to strengthen and develop the die business, while we also meet the needs of the low-noise high-end market with two new packaged microphones. "

Current MEMS microphone technology makes use of acoustically actuated membranes and static backplanes. Infineon's dual-backplane MEMS technology uses films embedded in the two backplanes to produce true differential signals. This can improve high-frequency immunity, ensure better audio signal processing, and increase the acoustic overload point of the total harmonic distortion (THD) by 10% to 135 dB SPL.

Its signal-to-noise ratio is 70 dB, which is an improvement of 6 dB compared to traditional MEMS microphones. This improvement is equivalent to doubling the distance a user can issue voice commands captured by a microphone. In addition, the analog and digital microphones feature excellent microphone-to-microphone matching (± 1 dB sensitivity matching and ± 2 ° phase matching), making them ideal for array-based deployments. For this reason, the MEMS microphone is very suitable for ultra-precise beamforming and noise reduction.

Supply
Engineering samples of this low-noise analog and digitally packaged MEMS microphone will be available in the fourth quarter of 2017, and production will begin in the first quarter of 2018.