Estimation of Capacitance

Abstract

The vast majority of microphones that are produced each year utilize capacitive sensing either through the use of a charged electret material or an applied bias voltage. The design of these microphones, in essentially all cases, relies on simple formulas to estimate the capacitance of parallel plate electrodes. This greatly limits the designs to follow the ubiquitous parallel plate configuration, with all of its common design challenges. In an attempt to overcome this limitation, in the following we review the basic principles of sensing charge and examine a capacitive sensing geometry that overcomes several of the common limitations encountered in capacitive microphone design. Our approach follows that described in [1], which presents an electrostatic sensing scheme that results in a minimum of electrostatic force and stiffness on the moving electrode.