More than 2 billion microphones are sold each year. A piezoelectric MEMS microphone can address the needs of the vast majority of this market but will need to be designed appropriately for each sector of the market. This market can be broken up into roughly three categories. About half of the market, 1 billion units per year, is for extremely inexpensive microphones for toys and other applications where size and performance are not crucial. Roughly 1 billion units per year are also sold for consumer electronics, mostly for mobile phone applications. There is also a small market of high-end microphones for instrumentation, recording studios and live events. Examples of large arrays of instrument quality microphones used in the aerospace industry include the wind tunnel measurements (where over 1000 microphone could be used) and in the ground test arrays (like the Boeing QTD2 array with over 600 microphones). The overall instrumentation microphone market is estimated at 100,000 units per year with prices around $1500 to $3000 per microphone. This instrumentation market will be the initial target of the microphones fabricated by Baker-Calling. Other applications include: hearing aids and noise cancelling headsets.
There are a great number of NASA test facilities where lower cost microphones are needed that can withstand harsh environmental conditions and acoustic loading. A partial listing includes: 1. Glenn Research Center: Acoustic Test Lab: phased array systems (e.g., 16 element linear array, 80 element microphone cage array, 63 element microphone spiral array); Nozzle Acoustic Test Rig; AeroAcoustic Propulsion Lab; Advanced Noise Control Fan Rig. 2. Langley Research Center: Structural Acoustics Loads and Transmission facility; Jet Noise Lab; Mobile Acoustics Research Capability; Anechoic Noise Facility. 3. Noise mapping at airports using large arrays. The applications of noise control are to aircraft noise mitigation (jet engine noise, flow noise and structural acoustic radiation) as well as for understanding the acoustics surrounding airports.
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