Design and Characterization of a Micro-Fabricated Graphene-Based MEMS Microphone

Abstract

We fabricate a MEMS microphone that incorpo- rates a graphene-based membrane that vibrates in response to acoustic forcing. We employ a novel fabrication process, where a graphene/PMMA bilayer membrane is transferred over a cavity on a separate chip before being affixed to the surface of another chip containing an electrode, resulting in the fabrication of a moveable capacitor with a membrane-to-electrode gap of 8 μm. The gap, which is less than half the size of other reported graphene membrane-based audio transducers, allows for the device to operate with low DC bias voltages of about 1 V and, when integrated with a custom-designed readout circuit, demonstrates a sensitivity to sound pressure between 0.1 mV/Pa and 10 mV/Pa across the range 100 Hz to 20 kHz. As well as a sensitivity that is comparable to previous work, the flat frequency response is stable when the sound pressure is varied between 70 dBSPL and 80 dBSPL, with the sensitivity value not varying by more than 0.2 mV/Pa.