The flat, square, chip-format Nanoscopic Electrostatic Drive (NED) microspeaker comes from German startup Arioso Systems, a spinoff of the larger Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems. It measures just 10 to 20 square millimeters, and is made entirely of silicon.
Arioso’s design replaces the conventional loudspeaker membrane with hundreds of moving beams. They use the chip’s volume instead of the surface and are driven by electrostatic forces.
Widespread CMOS fabrication processes can be used, the company claims, to make MEMS micro speaker design scalable for mass markets.