Characterization and Noise Analysis of Capacitive MEMS Acoustic Emission Transducers

Resonant type capacitive MEMS transducers were fabricated using a multi-user MEMS process (MUMPs) for the detection of acoustic emission (AE). Electrical and mechanical characterization of the MEMS transducers has been performed. The performance of the transducers is limited by the noise. In this paper, we present the noise analysis, the discussion of noise sources, and show that Brownian noise plays a significant role in the capacitive MEMS transducers.