Thanks @caredes again for posting another informative patent...

Thanks @caredes again for posting another informative patent application.

I have read and re-read this several times. I cannot quite get my head around what it is describing. It raises several points for me.

1. I've used ultrasonic cleaners for decades on all kinds of delicate instrumentation including the odd PCB. It never once occurred to me that US would do any of these things harm. So this concern comes as a surprise to me. I could imagine a MEMS microphone or similar device sitting close to a MEMS speaker might experience some interference, and this could be relevant. But there are US speaker chips already out there in the market. They modulate the US output of a US source, imposing an audio signal over the top of it. Do they have similar problems? I have assumed that EM had been involved with modulated MEMS speakers before AP came along with their DSR system.

2. I think that the 'housing' described here is supposed to act like the baffles of a gun silencer and is likely to be tuned to absorb the frequency of the US from the chip. From the description given I just cannot picture it clearly in my mind. I'm not sure if that comes down to the translation or the incompleteness of the information and diagrams.

3. From what I have understood the AP MEMS chip to be doing it should not be emitting US anyway. The clock used by the system runs in the US frequency range but it is used to time and synchronise the starts and stops of the pixel actuations. For it to emit US at that clock frequency it would have to have some of its pixels oscillating continuously between their two positions (up, down). If it is putting out US from some pixels for some particular function, say for gesture recognition or locating listeners in space, then does this US absorbing housing prevent that US from getting out? Is that capability eliminated?

4. Does this housing take the place of the polymeric membrane that was shown to be needed to protect the pixels from dust etc? Do the perforations do the same job? Or is the membrane still part of the system? Does the membrane not absorb some of the US?

5. Does this housing and its perforations affect the directional capabilities of the MEMS/DSR system?

6. This work was submitted for patent application on 9/7/24, so it must presumably have been sorted and deployed before then. But that means it had been completed and submitted before the 4C [31/7/24] and later announcements [19/8/24] had been made to SH, so this patentable info must be part of the background progress represented by those announcements. I note however that the measurements were made on the wafers, not finished chips.

" ... As has been previously reported, a number of proprietary design elements were incorporated into MEMS GEN-II chip design. These innovations were designed to complement the incomparable sound quality demonstrated in our Gen-I prototype chips, by offering a substantial increase to the chip’s sound pressure levels. Measurements conducted on both 6” and 8” wafers in our cleanroom, fully validate the accuracy of our multiphysics simulation models. These measurements confirm the commercial performance objectives established for our DSR platform. ..."

In short, while the announcements still give excellent reasons for optimism, some additional updated information will be required to make complete sense out of this patent info.