sensiBel is a Norwegian deep-tech scale-up company bringing to the market an optical MEMS microphone with 80dB SNR (14 dBA noise floor) and 132 dB dynamic range (146 dB Acoustic Overload Pressure or 10 % THD) in a small package.

This is a considerable improvement over state-of-the-art capacitive MEMS microphones. Despite constant improvement over the years, these are today limited to a SNR in the order of 73 dBA (21 dBA noise floor) with overall dynamic range in the order of 101 dB. There are fundamental challenges to driving the performance of capacitive MEMS microphone technology in small packages to new heights. Piezoelectric MEMS microphones have not demonstrated SNR performance >65 dBA.

We will present the fundamentals of optical acoustic transduction, explain why it can enable higher performance and how it can be implemented in a MEMS-based component.