• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2021.10a
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• pp.630-633
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• 2021

Microphones can convert received voice signals to electric signals. They have been widely used in various industries such as radios, smart devices and vehicles. Recently, the demands for small size and high sensitive microphones are increased according to the minimization of wireless earphone with the development of smart phone. A MEMS system is a good candidate for an ultra-small size microphone of a next generation and a read out IC for high sensitive MEMS sensor is researched from many industries and academies. Since the microphone system has a high sensitivity from environment noise and electric system noise, the system requires a low noise power supply and some low noise design techniques. In this paper, a low noise LDO is presented for small size MEMS microphone systems. The input supply voltage of the LDO is 1.5-3.6V, and the output voltage is 1.3V. Then, it can support to 5mA in the light load condition. The integrated output noise of proposed LDO form 20Hz to 20kHz is about 1.9uV. These post layout simulation results are performed with TSMC 0.18um CMOS technology and the size of layout is 325㎛ × 165㎛.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.269-274
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• 2018

High-sensitivity signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) microphones are essentially required for a broad range of automatic speech recognition applications. Piezoelectric microphones have several advantages compared to conventional capacitor microphones including high stiffness and high SNR. In this study, we designed a new piezoelectric membrane structure by using the finite elements method (FEM) and an optimization technique to improve the sensitivity of the transducer, which has a high-quality AlN piezoelectric thin film. The simulation demonstrated that the sensitivity critically depends on the inner radius of the top electrode, the outer radius of the membrane, and the thickness of the piezoelectric film in the microphone. The optimized piezoelectric transducer structure showed a much higher sensitivity than that of the conventional piezoelectric transducer structure. This study provides a visible path to realize micro-scale high-sensitivity piezoelectric microphones that have a simple manufacturing process, wide range of frequency and low DC bias voltage.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.22 no.12
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• pp.1659-1666
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• 2018

When the input sound is mixed voice and sound, it can be seen that the voice recognition rate is lowered due to the noise, and the speech recognition rate is improved by improving the MEMS device which is the H / W device in order to overcome the S/W processing limit. The MEMS microphone device is a device for inputting voice and is implemented in various shapes and used. Conventional MEMS microphones generally exhibit excellent performance, but in a special environment such as noise, there is a problem that the processing performance is deteriorated due to a mixture of voice and sound. To overcome these problems, we developed a newly designed MEMS device that can detect the voice characteristics of the initial input device.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2011.04a
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• pp.816-820
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• 2011

A method for increasing the difference of side-lobe level in spherical microphone array is presented. In array signal processing, it is known that narrow interval between sensors can increase the difference between main lobe and side-lobe of array response which eventually increase the source recognition capability. Recent commercial array being used, however, have shown certain limitation in using the number of sensors due to its costs and geometrical size of array. To overcome this problem, we have adapted MEMS sensors into spherical microphone array. To check out the improvement, two different types of spherical microphone array were designed. One array is composed with 32 regular instrument microphones and the other one is 85 MEMS sensors. Simulation and experiments were conducted on a sinusoidal noise source with two arrays. The time history data were analyzed with spherical harmonic decomposition and beamforming technique. 85 MEMS sensors array showed the improved side-lobe level suppression by more than 4 dB above the frequency content of 2 kHz compared to 32-sensor array.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.949-958
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• 2018

A voice recognition control system is a system for controlling a peripheral device by recognizing a voice. Recently, a voice recognition control system have been applied not only to smart devices but also to various environments ranging from IoT(: Internet of Things), robots, and vehicles. In such a voice recognition control system, the recognition rate is lowered due to the ambient noise in addition to the voice of the user. In this paper, we propose a dual channel acoustic beamforming hardware architecture for MEMS(: Microelectromechanical Systems) microphones to eliminate ambient noise in addition to user's voice. And the proposed hardware architecture is designed as ASIC(: Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) using TowerJazz $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS(: Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor) technology. The designed dual channel acoustic beamforming ASIC has a die size of $48mm^2$, and the directivity index of the user's voice were measured to be 4.233㏈.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.195-205
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• 2023

The contact acoustic emission (AE) monitoring system is time-consuming and costly for monitoring concrete structures in large scope, in addition, the great difference in acoustic impedance between air and concrete makes the detection process inconvenient. In this work, we broaden the conventional AE source localization method for concrete to the non-contact (air-coupled) micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) microphones array, which collects the energy-rich leaky Rayleigh waves, instead of the relatively weak P-wave. Finite element method was used for the numerical simulations, it is shown that the propagation velocity of leaky Rayleigh waves traveling along the air-concrete interface agrees with the corresponding theoretical properties of Lamb wave modes in an infinite concrete slab. This structures the basis for implementing a non-contact AE source location approach. Based on the experience gained from numerical studies, experimental studies on the proposed air-coupled AE source location in concrete slabs are carried out. Finally, it is shown that the locating map of AE source can be determined using the proposed system, and the accuracy is sufficient for most field monitoring applications on large plate-like concrete structures, such as tunnel lining and bridge deck.