The ability to measure the voltage readout from a sensor implanted inside the living cochlea enables continuous monitoring of intracochlear acoustic pressure locally, which could improve cochlear implants. We developed a piezoelectric intracochlear acoustic transducer (PIAT) designed to sense the acoustic pressure while fully implanted inside a living guinea pig cochlea. The PIAT, fabricated using micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) techniques, consisted of an array of four piezoelectric cantilevers with varying lengths to enhance sensitivity across a wide frequency bandwidth. Prior to implantation, benchtop tests were conducted to characterize the device performance in air and in water. When implanted in the cochlea of an anesthetized guinea pig, the in vivo voltage response from the PIAT was measured in response to 80–95 dB sound pressure level 1–14 kHz sinusoidal acoustic excitation at the entrance of the guinea pig’s ear canal. All sensed signals were above the noise floor and unaffected by crosstalk from the cochlear microphonic or external electrical interference. These results demonstrate that external acoustic stimulus can be sensed via the piezoelectric voltage response of the implanted MEMS transducer inside the living cochlea, providing key steps towards developing intracochlear acoustic sensors to replace external or subcutaneous microphones for auditory prosthetics.

Acoustic diffraction allows sound to travel around opaque objects and therefore may allow beyond-line-of-sight sensing of remote sound sources. This paper reports simulated and experimental results for localizing sound sources based on fully shadowed microphone array measurements. The generic geometry includes a point source, a solid 90° wedge, and a receiving array that lies entirely in the shadow defined by the source location and the wedge. Source localization performance is assessed via matched-field (MF) ambiguity surfaces as a function of receiving array configuration, and received signal-to-noise ratio for the Bartlett and minimum variance distortionless (MVD) MF processors. Here, the sound propagation model is developed from a Green's function integral treatment. A simple 16 element line array of microphones is tested in three mutually orthogonal orientations. The experiments were conducted using an approximate 50-to-1-scaled tabletop model of a blind city-street intersection and produced ambiguity surfaces from source frequencies between 17.5 and 19 kHz that were incoherently summed. The experimental results suggest that a sound source may be localized by the MVD processor when using fully shadowed arrays that have significant aperture parallel to the edge of the wedge. However, this performance is reduced significantly for signal-to-noise ratios below 40 dB.

In this paper we describe a method for controlling both the residual stress and the through-thickness stress gradient of aluminum nitride (AlN) thin films using a multi-step deposition process that varies the applied radio frequency (RF) substrate bias. The relationship between the applied RF substrate bias and the AlN residual stress is characterized using AlN films grown on oxidized silicon substrates is determined using 100 nm–1.5 μm thick blanket AlN films that are deposited with 60–100 W applied RF biases; the stress-bias relationship is found to be well described using a power law relationship. Using this relationship, we develop a model for varying the RF bias in a series of discrete deposition steps such that each deposition step has zero average stress. The applied RF bias power in these steps is tailored to produce AlN films that have minimized both the residual stress and the film stress gradient. AlN cantilevers were patterned from films deposited using this technique, which show reduced curvature compared to those deposited using a single RF bias setting, indicating a reduction of the stress gradient in the films.

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The influence of alternating current (AC) target power on film stress, roughness, and x-ray diffraction rocking curve full width half maximum (FWHM) was examined for AlN films deposited using S-gun magnetron sputtering on insulative substrates consisting of Si wafers with 575 nm thermal oxide. As the AC target power was increased from 5 to 8 kW, the deposition rate increased from 9.3 to 15.9 A/s, film stress decreased from 81 to −170 MPa, and the rocking curve FWHM increased from 0.98 to 1.03°. AlN film behavior is observed to change with target life; films deposited at 200 kWh target life were approximately 40 MPa more compressive and had 0.02° degree higher rocking curve FWHM values than films deposited at 130 kWh. AlN films deposited in two depositions were compared with films deposited in a single deposition, in order to better characterize the growth behavior and properties of AlN films deposited on an existing AlN film, which is not well understood. Two deposition films, when compared with single deposition films, showed no variation in residual stress trends or grain size behavior, but the average film roughness increased from 0.7 to 1.4 nm and rocking curve FWHM values increased by more than 0.25°.