Crossing the Chasm: from Academic Lab to Consumer Pockets

The increasing maturity of thin-film piezoelectric materials and the MEMS manufacturing ecosystem has enabled the rapid development of sensor systems based on piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers (PMUTs). Starting around 2008, I began research that resulted in new PMUT-based ultrasonic time-of-flight sensors, ultrasonic fingerprint sensors for biometric identification, and ultimately in founding and selling a startup company, Chirp Microsystems. These innovations made my university laboratory (then located at UC Davis) a hub of ultrasound innovation and Janusz Bryzek and his Exo Imaging co-founders tested their early PMUTs there.

Janusz was a personal hero of mine and it has been rewarding to see him and the Exo team commercialize PMUTs for medical imaging. In this talk, I will share some of the engineering that made our ultrasonic products possible, I will tell the story of bringing this technology from the university lab to the consumer market, and I will share some stories about how Janusz influenced me over the years.