And here i was googling wtf a tactile buzzer is lol

Your work continues to blow my mind also. Thank you for bringing this high quality educational entertainment to me. 😊😊

I didn't catch it - I was too busy looking at that mems marvel (:

It's interesting we see no microorganisms. It's really work to keep things sterile.

So did the rapper MIMS name himself after MEMS, or did MEMS get backronym'd from MIMS? Or is it just a coincidence? Either way 🤯 mind blown! 😂😂

Yeah, that was a really impressive render! Was that model hand made, or is there some way to automagically process SEM images into 3D models?

@@DaveNagy1 I believe it was hand made as it looked different in many ways

making conceptual basic 3d models is not that hard if someone has a good sense of 3d imagination. i find it crazier that he is able to break a thing many times smaller than a hair in two 🤯

And all that for ten bucks

​@@DaveNagy1for sure hand made. The model itself would be pretty quick to make, but texturing, creating the environment, animating all that would take a decent amount of time. I'd imagine this would probably be something he modelled then sent out to an animator to render up. There's not a lot of cross over between cad modelling for engineering and pretty stuff sadly. That said I wouldn't put it past him to do it all himself, legend.

Crazy. I just made much the same comment before seeing yours. It really is amazing how fast microelectronics has developed

@@jimurrata6785 I absolutely cannot wait to see what’s coming in another 30 years.

Magic is technology not yet discovered

​@@GeraltOfRivia69exactly! Everything is possible

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" Arthur C. Clarke

The rendered footage was some of the best I've seen before on educational content.

I am in awe, I have gotten into microelectronics lately after watching lots of Asianometry videos and this visual exploration of this microphone was astonishing. Seeing the small features contrasted with a human hair really put everything in perspective in a wonderful way.

Awesome video!

Sounds like vacuum in there!

@@linecraftman3907 sounds like space!

key to it all is the perfect repeatability and precision of silicon lithography. the signal is very weak and the frequency response is terrible but it can be precisely characterised and corrected using the built in integrated circuit.

@@drkastenbrot cool

​@@drkastenbrotalso the ability to make an ic with that capability fit in there with such low power

What might blow your mind too are a type of sensor, found in most smartphones, smart watches, etc., which is closely related to MEMS microphones in their construction (and which in fact came first): MEMS barometers. Rather than the membrane being moved by sound, it’s got a sealed cavity so that as external air pressure changes, the air in the cavity expands or contracts, making the membrane bow in or out, changing its distance and thus the capacitance. What’s incredible is that they’re so sensitive that this is what your phone uses to detect changes in your altitude. Yes, your phone tells how many floors of stairs you climbed by measuring the difference in air pressure. So you might think it’s sensitive enough to measure a meter or two of altitude, right? Nope, they have a resolution of a few _centimeters._ I find it truly incredible that these sensors can actually tell the difference in air pressure over literally one palm’s width of altitude.

@@tookitogo it’s truly awesome tech. I remember figuring out that one of my old android phones had a Yamaha component for an accelerometer. Been pretty hooked on micro tech since then.

exatly what i was thinking, its probably pretty "plug and play" for the manufacturers but still so cool

so much fabbed silicon in a cheap throwaway device

People don’t appreciate just how far we got

Economy of scale is a crazy thing

im amazed at the amount of reverse engineering lol

you alao got access to a SEM, right? maybe investigating something like that would be a nice video idea as well :)

huh, that's a concise but insightful bit of knowledge, and goes to explain quite a bit, thanks!

Neat, TIL! Thanks for the explanation!

😊😊😊

To my best knowledge, the size of the cavity vs. the diameter of the central hole define your lower cut-off frequency, otherwise this thing would be driven into saturation by low-frequency or static pressure.

@@commander-tomalak that's my thought. Vented microphone to control for VLF and barometric pressure, the cavity for resonance, the steps to tune and reflect various frequency harmonics. Impressive, given the frequencies used in narrowband telephony is around 300 - 3400 Hz, wavelengths ranging from around 45" - 4"! Yep, a quick lookup shows they're called a MEMS resonant microphone array. Here's a discussion on active noise cancellation using the technology. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7978172/

There's probably just a single mic in one of the earbuds. Lookup "digikey mems mic" and you can find them starting at 47 cents each if you buy 1000. This is a US retailer selling reputable parts. If you get them directly from China, which is probably where these earbuds originate, they'd of course be significantly cheaper.

They would probably also help increase the capacity by enlarging the surface area when the membrane is close to the other electrode.

i would speculate that it's mostly just a byproduct of how the thing is manufactured

Thanks! I believe the dimples are _mostly_ an artifact of the manufacturing steps to make one. There are a few ways it could have been made, but my current theory is: pattern and etch the base substrate giving nice clean holes, deposit a layer of glass on top (which will naturally form rounded dimples over the holes), deposit another layer of undoped polysilicon and then a doped polysilicon layer, then finally etch out the sacrificial glass layer (with HF or plasma) leaving the gap between the two layers. Finally flip and etch the big cavity. Just a guess but it makes sense to me. The holes in the lower layer are to help air move past it with minimal resistance, but the dimples on the surface aren't really needed. So I think it's leftover from the layered nature of fabrication.

@@BreakingTaps You mean a totally flat disk without dimples could not be fabricated? I wouldn't expect that, but I don't know anything about processes at this micro level. I'm just blown away that they actually work as well as they do. Are neodymium magnets used at this scale?

​@@professordeb It's technically possible to get a flat disk on top of the hole'y layer, but it would be a lot more work. There's another process called "chemical-mechanical planarization" which is basically a super fancy sand paper for wafers 😁 It's used to flatten the top layer by grinding/polishing until all the ridges are gone. It's often used on high density microchips like computer CPUs, because you have soooo many layers that everything starts to get rounded. So they periodically flatten it with the planarization tools. So to get a flat surface for this device, you'd deposit a really thick sacrificial layer, then grind it back flat, then proceed with the next steps. But if you don't _need_ it to be flat, you can skip and save money. Magnets aren't used a lot at this scale because (I think) the magnetization process needs high temperatures and it can be difficult for the devices to survive. Although I've seen some papers about using laser-heating and such, so I'm sure it's doable. At this size, electrostatic, thermal and piezo mechanisms tend to be more common.

I told Santa that I wanted an SEM for Christmas. Unfortunately, he said that I was too heavy, get the fuck off of his lap. Back during the last Ice Age and I was in school, our junior high and high school had donated TEM units, which we were allowed to use. By the time my kids went to school, the electron microscopes were long gone, as were the optical microscopes.

The MEMS resonant microphone array is a fascinating technology, especially the tiny resonant chamber within the unit.

The cavity is a resonant chamber. The microphone is referred to as a MEMS resonant microphone array. Pair them up and one can have quality active noise cancellation. The cavity is a resonant chamber, the steps for different frequencies.

I counted 7 heavy etchings on one component, couldn't get a good count for thinner etchings for things like the resonant chamber. Then, I considered how many ways I could badly injure myself on the equipment that builds these devices... Ion beam, HF, yeah, gotta be a pain to maintain those machines!

Commonly, after making the bond to the lead frame (after first bonding to the bond pad on the chip) the wire-bond machine severs the wire with an electric arc. This arc produces a spherical blob of molten wire, which cools and solidifies. That little ball is right below the surface of the bonding foot. So when the bonding foot is pressed down onto the next bond pad on the chip, it compresses the ball onto the bond pad, creating the electrical and mechanical connection to the bond pad. So the little balls are of gold or aluminum, whatever the bond wire metal happens to be.

Now, where chips are bonded directly to each other or PCB, the balls are usually made of solder or tin or indium. Actually, they are referred to as bumps for this kind of bonding operation.

Will try that on the next one! I admit to being a bit lazy and just smashed it with some tweezers haha

Thanks! In theory there are ways to get the real 3D data. I've done it on some AFM videos in the past (the heightmap from the AFM can be turned into a mesh pretty easily). The biggest issue with the AFM for this is just field-of-view... it's max is about 20x20 micrometers 😅 So that technique only works with very specific objects. The SEM has a feature that sorta captures 3D data by collecting data from different segments of the internal sensor, but it's not super robust. And it's better for capturing texture rather than "prismatic" 3d objects, if that makes sense. I'd love to get ahold of a real laser confocal microscope some day. That'd allow much 3D data of much larger objects. You can also do focal plane stacking to capture 3D images, using a regular microscope. It's done by macro photography people mostly, but works well for microscopes too. With a little calibration it can be surprisingly accurate. Finally, if I had a stage in the SEM that could be rotated, you could collect a bunch of photos and do photogrammetry. But yeah, for this video I just modeled it by hand :)

Thats exactly my thought also!