Modeling and measuring the effects of mutual impedance on multi-cell CMUT configurations

This paper presents a numerical method for calculating the frequency response of a CMUT with a large number of cells. In a multi-cell configuration, commonly found in CMUTs, each cell is affected by the acoustic loading from neighboring cells. Thus, for an accurate model of a multi-cell CMUT element it is better to consider the mutual acoustic impedance instead of the acoustic impedance of a single cell only. We calculate the velocity of every cell (plate movement) simultaneously, with the mutual impedance effects taken into account. The model predicts that the cells exhibit different frequency responses, based on their locations in the element. We used a laser interferometer to validate the model by measuring the displacement response of a CMUT immersed in vegetable oil. The device has 169 circular cells (single crystal silicon plates, 500 nm thick, 21 μm radii) placed in a hexagonal cell arrangement. The measurement results agree well with the numerical results. The computation time of our method is significantly shorter than finite element based calculations. Our model can be used for finding optimized cell configurations for CMUTs utilized in various applications such as medical imaging and therapeutic treatment.