Akustica introduces two new high performance microphones
Akustica, Inc., a Bosch Group company and provider of MEMS microphones, has expanded the Bosch consumer MEMS sensor portfolio with the addition of two new, highly robust, high performance analog microphones.
The AKU151 is a tiny, top-port microphone with both high SNR and high acoustic performance density (SNR/mm3), and the AKU350 is an ultra-high performance 67dB SNR bottom-port microphone. The new microphones leverage Akustica/Bosch's latest MEMS, ASIC, and package designs and enhanced manufacturing processes to deliver the industry-leading performance and quality requested by consumer electronics manufacturers and expected from Bosch, the world's leading MEMS sensor supplier.
According to IHS, the MEMS microphone market will exceed $1.4 billion by 2018, almost doubling in size from 2012, with high performance microphones (>64dB SNR) being the quickest growing and largest segment of the market. This growth is being fueled by an increased focus on voice-input quality by smartphone manufacturers who are integrating multiple MEMS microphones into each smartphone to achieve improved noise suppression and speech recognition accuracy for their end users. In recent years, MEMS microphones have also become increasingly important for use in wearable devices which rely on voice as a key user interface such as headsets, smart glasses, and smart watches. These space-constrained, battery-operated devices bring a whole new set of acoustic challenges to device manufacturers who need microphones that are smaller and lower power but still provide high acoustic performance to address far-field use cases where the user's mouth is farther away from the microphone.
Akustica's newest microphones demonstrate the advantage of combining in-house MEMS, ASIC, and package design with in-house fabrication facilities. The microphones are the first to make use of new ASIC design elements that optimize performance depending on the target market. The two new microphones are also the first to be built using a new MEMS architecture and fabrication process which includes additional material layers and optimized thicknesses of current layers. And, the AKU151 is the world's first microphone to use an advanced, metal-lid, direct-port package.
