xMEMS Labs is showing off a new speaker technology at CES that has the potential to shake the foundations of the commercial audio industry and revolutionize the way we both experience and produce music. These all-silicon speakers are incredibly tiny and have the potential to allow designers to move past the limitations imposed by the coil-and-magnet drivers that have dominated audio playback for more than a century.
I got an in-person demo from xMEMS VP of marketing Mike Housholder during the event, and it’s now apparent that the technology will be entering the consumer market sooner rather than later. The big news is introduction of the Sycamore MEMS loudspeaker, the company’s first all-silicon speaker, and the the µCooling fan-on-a-chip.
xMEMS Labs’ Sycamore MEMS chip.
xMEMS Labs
The Sycamore MEMS loudspeaker represents a genuine leap forward in what xMEMS calls “micro fidelity” audio. Consider it a radical departure from traditional speaker design, swapping out the coil and magnet systems for an all-silicon platform.
“We’ve replaced paper and plastic diaphragms with silicon,” Housholder explained during the presentation, highlighting the unique thin-film piezoelectric layer that drives Sycamore’s sound production. At just one-seventh the size and one-third the thickness of conventional drivers, Sycamore offers designers unprecedented flexibility to create slimmer, more stylish devices.
If you’ve been paying attention to the in-ear headphone market, you might have heard that xMEMS speakers are already on the market. That’s true, but the units that are currently for sale utilize the company’s Cypress speaker, with is essentially an all-silicon tweeter augmented by a traditional driver that handles the low end frequenices. This solution compensated for a time when the MEMS (micro-electromechanical system) technology could not reproduce the full audio spectrum.
Those hybrid speakers are now available in true wireless stereo (TWS) earbuds featuring xMEMS technology. The Creative Aurvana Ace and Soundpeats Capsule3 Pro+ have earned accolades for their sound quality, which Housholder said is “punching and competing with the big boys in the market.” Consumers can also check out the Noble Audio FoKus Triumph and the new Creative Aurvana Ace 2 earbuds.
Creative Aurvana Ace 2 truly wireless earbuds.
Creative Labs
While that’s been a promising technology, the star of the show was a demo of earbuds that utilize the new Sycamore chip. xMEMS has solved the full audio spectrum problem. While the most finicky audiophiles might claim to miss some sound at the very low end of the spectrum, the untuned earbuds reveal that these speakers are ready for commercial products today, and it’s exciting to think about how much they can improve as audio engineers begin to work with them.
Sycamore is also geared for integration into devices where space is at a premium: Think smartwatches, augmented reality glasses, and open wireless stereo earbuds. I saw demos of all three and the smartwatch case was especially impressive. When strapped onto my wrist, audio had much better clarity than what I get from an Apple Watch. This will be great for notifications as well as phone calls. Housholder also suggests that a thin Cypress speaker will give phone manufacturers more space for other components and offer an opportunity to make future smartwatches much thinner than what we’re using today.
During the CES presentation, Housholder also touched on the broader implications of MEMS speakers for spatial audio, showing a set of over-ear headphones that have multiple speakers built into each earcup, a development that offers the opportunity for a new approach to immersive audio.
“What you need for spatial audio is phase accuracy and consistency, and that’s what you get with silicon,” he explained. Sycamore and Cypress bring perfectly matched left-right speaker pairs, improving localization accuracy by up to 30 percent—a boon for applications like gaming headsets.
xMEMS Labs’ Sycamore speaker-on-a-chip promises to radically improve the audio quality of smart watches.
James Barber/Foundry
But Sycamore isn’t the only headline act. xMEMS’ µCooling system tackles a completely different problem: thermal management in ultra-mobile devices. µCooling is the first active micro-cooling solution built on a solid-state, all-silicon platform. Just 1 millimeter thick, this fan-on-a-chip operates silently and without vibrations—an ideal fit for thin smartphones, tablets, and AI-powered gadgets. “For the first time, manufacturers can integrate active cooling in mobile devices without compromising their form factor,” said Housholder.
xMEMS’ innovations are rapidly gaining adoption, with major manufacturers integrating their transducers into products slated for release this year. For Sycamore, Housholder confirmed that “alpha customers” are already testing these components, with production-ready designs expected mid-year.
Look for MEMS technology to make its first impact in the in-ear headphone and wearable speaker markets, but things start to get really interesting when you contemplate what designers will be able to do with directional audio once they can include multiple tiny speakers in a headphone or—eventually—a car audio system. xMEMS is on the forefront of a genuinely new technology, and there’s a real possibility that we’ll look back at this time as the beginning of something really exciting and genuinely new in the audio world.
