MEMS Cochlear Transducer Project
Design, modeling, and fabrication of MEMS sensors which mimic some
of the mechanics of the mammalian cochlea as an alternative, low-power
acoustic transduction and signal analysis mechanism. With Karl Grosh
at Univ. of Michigan.
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Related Publications:
PhD Thesis:
My doctoral thesis (6 MB PDF), "Biomimetic Trapped Fluid Microsystems for Acoustic Sensing" completed July 2005.
Papers:
White, R. D. and Grosh, K. "Trapped-Fluid Traveling Wave Filters Based on the Mammalian Cochlea" in Proceedings of the uTAS 2005 Conference, Ninth International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Science, K. F. Jensen, J. Han, D. J. Harrison, and J. Voldman, Eds., pp. 666-668. PDF of
the paper.
White, R. D. and Grosh, K. "Fully Micromachined Lifesize Cochlear
Model" in Auditory Mechanisms: Processes and Models, A. L. Nuttall,
ed., World Scientific, 2006. PDF of the paper.
Galbraith, C., White, R. D., Grosh, K., and Rebeiz, G. M. "A mammalian
cochlea-based RF channelizer filter" in Microwave Symposium Digest,
2005 IEEE MTT-S International, 12-17 June 2005 pp. 1935-1938. PDF of
the paper.
White,
R. D., and Grosh, K. "Microengineered hydromechanical cochlear model"
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102 (5),
pp. 1296-1301. Shows the results of mechanical experiments and
models on orthotropic and isotropic membranes with 2 different
viscosity fluids. Traveling waves and a frequency position map are
demonstrated. Agreement with model is shown. Fab process is briefly
described. PDF of
the paper.
White,
R. D., Cheng, L., and Grosh, K. "Capacitively sensed micromachined
hydrophone with viscous fluid-structure coupling", Proceedings of the
SPIE, Photonics West: MOEMS-MEMS Micro & Nanofabrication San Jose,
vol. 5718, 121 (2005) pp. 121-132. This paper describes results for
a single-channel sensor fabricated with the same process as the
cochlear-like device, but operating on different principles. A
working capacitive sensing scheme is demonstrated. PDF of the
paper.
White, R. D. and Grosh, K. "A micromachined cochlear-like acoustic
sensor", in Proceedings of the SPIE, vol. 4700, 2002 pp. 89-100. (680 kB
PDF) Presented at the SPIE Smart Structures and Materials Conference,
in March 2002. Emphasizes results of initial processing run, and also
shows some experimental results for a macroscale transducer.
White, R. D. and
Grosh, K. "Design and characterization of a MEMS piezoresistive
cochlear-like acoustics sensor", in Proceedings of the 2002 ASME
IMECE. (350 kB PDF) Presented at IMECE 2002 (Paper submitted in
July 2002). Emphasizes mechanical and piezresistor modeling, and also
shows some experimental results for piezos and mechanical
response.
Posters:
- The ONR 2005
Poster (1 MB PDF) presented at the 2005 U.S. Navy Workshop on
Acoustic Transduction Materials and Devices. This poster shows
results for both single and multichannel sensors.
- The ONR 2004
Poster (2 MB PDF) presented at the 2004 U.S. Navy Workshop on
Acoustic Transduction Materials and Devices. This poster shows
results for the fluid-structure traveling wave, frequency-position
map, and designs for a capacitive sensing scheme, along with predicted
sensitivity of the device.
- The ONR 2003
Poster (230 kB PDF) presented at the 2003 US Navy Workshop on Acoustic
Transduction Materials and Devices. This poster shows initial results
for the fluid-filled device and piezoresistive strain gauges
- The ONR 2002
Poster (540 kB PDF) presented at the 2002 U.S. Navy Workshop
on Acoustic Transduction Materials and Devices on the design,
fabrication, and initial experimental results in air for the MEMS
cochlear transducer
- The ONR 2001
Poster (3 MB PDF)presented at the 2001 U.S. Navy Workshop
on Acoustic Transduction Materials and Devices on the original design
of the MEMS cochlear-like transducer.
Press On the Cochlear-like Transducer
After the publication of our PNAS paper, a number of press releases
came out about our system. Some of these ran their articles verbatim by
Prof. Grosh and I before publishing them, some did not. Due to this,
some of the articles exagerate the progress we have made; although we
are interested in cochlear implants, and would love to apply our
sensor technology to such an effort, the system has not been
implanted, is not ready to be implanted, and is still under
development.
- National Science Foundation Discovery Article
- University
of Michigan University Record
- Physics Web
- EE Times
- MSNBC
- Nanotechwire
- NanoApex
- Technology Research News Magazine (TRN Mag)
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