Publication
Capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers (CMUTs) have been widely utilized in applications of biomolecule monitoring, ultrasound medical diagnosis, and ultrasound therapy because of their advantages in high-level integration with integrated circuits, good impedance matching for acoustic transmission, and flexible element and array configuration compared with conventional piezoelectric ceramic transducers. Crosstalk effects on dynamics of a CMUT element, i.e. electrical, mechanical, and acoustic performance, would lead to unexpected spurious resonances. In this study, the mutual interaction from fluid and nearby cells in a CMUT element is newly investigated specially aiming to characterize their coupling effects with series and parallel parasitic effects based on a nonlinear Equivalent Circuit Model (ECM). The mutual interaction is evaluated with the electromechanical and acoustic characteristics by comparison between ECM and 3D Finite Element Analysis (FEA). Two representative CMUT element configurations, that are the rectangular with nine cells and the hexagonal with seven cells, are analyzed with different center-to-center distance. The radii of cells are set to be lambda 8 with different edge-to-edge distances. The parasitic effects are modeled by a series parasitic factor and a parallel-capacitance parasitic ratio. The coupling influence of crosstalk and parasitic effects on the performance of a CMUT element is evaluated, such as the impedance, phase, conductance, velocity, and ultrasound pressure field. The results of ECM-FEA-based methods show good agreements, and the improved ECM can be used for co-parasitic extraction with front-end interface.