Capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers (CMUTs) have been introduced as a promising technology for ultrasound imaging and therapeutic ultrasound applications which require high transmitted pressures for increased penetration, high signal-to-noise ratio, and fast heating. However, output power limitation of CMUTs compared with piezoelectrics has been a major drawback. In this work, we show that the output pressure of CMUTs can be significantly increased by deep-collapse operation, which utilizes an electrical pulse excitation much higher than the collapse voltage. We extend the analyses made for CMUTs working in the conventional (uncollapsed) region to the collapsed region and experimentally verify the findings. The static deflection profile of a collapsed membrane is calculated by an analytical approach within 0.6% error when compared with static, electromechanical finite element method (FEM) simulations. The electrical and mechanical restoring forces acting on a collapsed membrane are calculated. It is demonstrated that the stored mechanical energy and the electrical energy increase nonlinearly with increasing pulse amplitude if the membrane has a full-coverage top electrode. Utilizing higher restoring and electrical forces in the deep-collapsed region, we measure 3.5 MPa peak-to-peak pressure centered at 6.8 MHz with a 106% fractional bandwidth at the surface of the transducer with a collapse voltage of 35 V, when the pulse amplitude is 160 V. The experimental results are verified using transient FEM simulations.

In this paper, we report measurement results on dual-electrode CMUT demonstrating electromechanical coupling coefficient (k2) of 0.82 at 90% of collapse voltage as well as 136% 3 dB one-way fractional bandwidth at the transducer surface around the design frequency of 8 MHz. These results are within 5% of the predictions of the finite element simulations. The large bandwidth is achieved mainly by utilizing a non-uniform membrane, introducing center mass to the design, whereas the dual-electrode structure provides high coupling coefficient in a large dc bias range without collapsing the membrane. In addition, the non-uniform membrane structure improves the transmit sensitivity of the dual-electrode CMUT by about 2dB as compared with a dual electrode CMUT with uniform membrane.

This paper introduces a simplified fabrication method for vacuum-sealed capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) arrays using anodic bonding. Anodic bonding provides the established advantages of wafer-bondingbased CMUT fabrication processes, including process simplicity, control over plate thickness and properties, high fill factor, and ability to implement large vibrating cells. In addition to these, compared with fusion bonding, anodic bonding can be performed at lower processing temperatures, i.e., 350°C as opposed to 1100°C; surface roughness requirement for anodic bonding is more than 10 times more relaxed, i.e., 5-nm rootmean- square (RMS) roughness as opposed to 0.5 nm for fusion bonding; anodic bonding can be performed on smaller contact area and hence improves the fill factor for CMUTs. Although anodic bonding has been previously used for CMUT fabrication, a CMUT with a vacuum cavity could not have been achieved, mainly because gas is trapped inside the cavities during anodic bonding. In the approach we present in this paper, the vacuum cavity is achieved by opening a channel in the plate structure to evacuate the trapped gas and subsequently sealing this channel by conformal silicon nitride deposition in the vacuum environment. The plate structure of the fabricated CMUT consists of the single-crystal silicon device layer of a silicon-on-insulator wafer and a thin silicon nitride insulation layer. The presented fabrication approach employs only three photolithographic steps and combines the advantages of anodic bonding with the advantages of a patterned metal bottom electrode on an insulating substrate, specifically low parasitic series resistance and low parasitic shunt capacitance. In this paper, the developed fabrication scheme is described in detail, including process recipes. The fabricated transducers are characterized using electrical input impedance measurements in air and hydrophone measurements in immersion. A representative design is used to demonstrate immersion operation in conventional, collapse-snapback, and collapse modes. In collapsemode operation, an output pressure of 1.67 MPa pp is shown at 7 MHz on the surface of the transducer for 60-Vpp, 3-cycle sinusoidal excitation at 30-V dc bias.

In this paper, we describe a capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) with improved transparency for photoacoustic imaging (PAI) with backside illumination. The CMUT was fabricated on a glass substrate with indium-tin oxide bottom electrodes. The plate was a 1.5- silicon layer formed over the glass cavities by anodic bonding, with a 1- silicon nitride passivation layer on top. The fabricated device shows approximately 30%-40% transmission in the wavelength range from 700 to 800 nm and approximately 40%-60% transmission in the wavelength range from 800 to 900 nm, which correspond to the wavelength range commonly used for in vivo PAI. The center frequency of the CMUT was 3.62 MHz in air and 1.4 MHz in immersion. Two preliminary PAI experiments were performed to demonstrate the imaging capability of the fabricated device. The first imaging target was a 0.7-mm diameter pencil lead in vegetable oil as a line target with a subwavelength cross section. A 2-mm-diameter single CMUT element with an optical fiber bundle attached to its backside was linearly scanned to reconstruct a 2-D cross-sectional PA image of the pencil lead. We investigated the spurious signals caused by the light absorption in the 1.5- silicon plate. For pencil lead as a strong absorber and also a strong reflector, the received echo signal due to the acoustic excitation generated by the absorption in silicon is approximately 30 dB lower than the received PA signal generated by the absorption in pencil lead at the wavelength of 830 nm. The second imaging target was a "loop-shape" polyethylene tube filled with indocyanine green solution ( ) suspended using fishing lines in a tissue-mimicking material. We formed a 3-D volumetric image of the phantom by scanning the transducer in the - and -directions. The two experimental imaging results demonstrated that CMUTs with the proposed structure are promising for PAI with backside illumination.

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