Grant: Alliance Grants

This project is the continuation of a long-established partnership between Prof. St-Gelais lab at uOttawa and Montreal-based industrial partner Soundskrit. Since 2018, St-Gelais lab has been providing Soundskrit with advanced characterization services during the successful development of their core technology: a MEMS (microelectromechanical) microphone that is sensitive not only to sound amplitude (i.e., loudness), but also to sound direction-a unique feature in MEMS microphones. While continuing our characterization partnership, this work will expand our collaborative effort into a new promising direction: developing integrated optical readout for increasing the performance of Soundskrit microphones. Recent work in academia show that optically measuring the displacement of a microphone sensing element can significantly enhance its acoustic performances. As an agile mid-size hardware company, Soundskrit sees an opportunity to enter the high-end microphone market with such a sensing approach. However, the accoustic element in Soundskrit microphone moves by a very large amount compared to traditional MEMS. Displacement by more than one optical wavelength will command the invention of new optical sensing methods not based on interferometry.