Duration: 2024-28
Acronym: Pionear
PI Name: Kamil Gradkowski
Topic: Packaging
Title: A photonic microphone with better-than-human-ear sound quality
Coordinator: Lumiary AB (Sweden)
Total Participants: 7
Contribution: € 637K€
Instrument: Horizon Europe EIC (European Innovation Council)

Project Intro:
The sense of hearing is critical to how we communicate and perceive the world. In our ever more digital and virtual lives, microphones are playing an increasingly important role. With MEMS technology, microphones have developed tremendously in the past decades. in terms of size and cost and are now ubiquitous in our living spaces, and they are also used in industry for a variety of purposes. Yet, despite all this progress, microphone technology falls short of perceiving audio as well as the human ear: No microphone has selfnoise ≤ 0 dB SPL (defined as the threshold of human hearing) the capability to sense sounds up to 120-130 dB SPL, and also a bandwidth of 20 kHz. By combining electronic, micromechanic and photonic technology, PIONEAR will build the first microphone with better-than-humanear sound quality, which will additionally have a miniature form factor. It will enable an immediate and vivid connection between the physical and the digital, creating augmented sonic and linguistic links to enhance the wonder of being alive. Armed with microphones that have very low noise, devices with microphone arrays will be able to listen with programmable directivity with higher selectivity than what is currently possible, paving the way for products with intelligently selective hearing similar to how humans hear. Applications range from consumer electronics to autonomous robots and vehicles and environmental monitoring. Although the focus of PIONEAR is to create a novel proof-of-concept photonics-based microphone, the underlying sensor concept is not limited to microphones. We expect that it will be applicable, with similar performance improvements, in a broad range of sensor categories, for example pressure and ultrasonic sensors, biochemical sensors, gas and aerosol sensors, and accelerometers