An Electronically Tunable Multi-Frequency Air-Coupled CMUT Receiver Array with sub-100µPa Minimum Detectable Pressure Achieving a 28kb/s Wireless Uplink Across a Water-Air Interface

📋 论文概要

该论文提出了一种电子可调谐的多频空气耦合电容式微机械超声换能器（CMUT）接收阵列，用于水下物联网中的超声通信。通过解决水-空气界面的大信号衰减问题，实现了低于100微帕的最小可检测压力。

💡 主要创新点

• 提出了一种电子可调谐的多频CMUT接收阵列，能够适应不同频率的超声信号。
• 实现了亚100微帕的最小可检测压力，显著提高了水下超声接收的灵敏度。
• 通过空气耦合设计，克服了水-空气界面的高传输损耗。

🏷 关键词

📄 原文摘要

Oceans play a critical role in our ecosystem – they regulate weather and global temperature, serve as the largest carbon sink and the greatest source of oxygen. Maintaining ocean health is of paramount importance and has led to the emergence of the “Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT)” with intelligent sensors being deployed for aquaculture, environmental monitoring, surveillance, and exploration. Given that RF and optical signals are heavily attenuated in water, and ultrasound (US) – which has favorable propagation underwater – faces a large water-air interface loss (~65dB), deep underwater sensing nodes most often communicate data via ultrasonic links to surface buoys, which then use RF to relay data to a remote station. However, such relay-based water-to-air networking solutions are cost and infrastructure intensive, with the inflexibility of anchored buoys prohibiting operation at scale. Wireless, cross-medium communication

👥 作者与机构

Ajay Singhvi, Aidan Fitzpatrick, Amin Arbabian

Stanford University, Stanford, CA