BIOGRAPHY

Novel Ultrasonic Fingerprint Sensor Based on High-Frequency Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers (PMUTs) [BPN628]
This project presents the first MEMS ultrasonic fingerprint sensor with the capability to image epidermis and dermis layer fingerprints. The sensor is based on a piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer (PMUT) array that is bonded at wafer-level to complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) signal processing electronics to produce a pulse-echo ultrasonic imager on a chip. To meet the 500 DPI standard for consumer fingerprint sensors, the PMUT pitch was reduced by approximately a factor of two relative to an earlier design. We conducted a systematic design study of the individual PMUT and array to achieve this scaling while maintaining a high fill-factor. The resulting 110X56 PMUT array, composed of 30um X 43um rectangular PMUTs achieved a 51.7% fill-factor, three times greater than that of the previous design. Together with the custom CMOS ASIC, the sensor chieves 2 uV/Pa sensitivity, 19 kPa peak-to-peak pressure output, 75 um lateral resolution, and 150 um axial resolution in a 4.6 mm X 3.2 mm image.