Abstract
This paper reports the characteristics of piezoelectric microspeakers that are audible in open air with high quality piezoelectric AlN thin film according to the materials properties. When we use a tensile-stressed silicon nitride diaphragm as a supporting layer, the Sound Pressure Level (SPL) is relatively small and constant at low frequency region and shows about 70 dB at 10 kHz. However, in case of a compressively stressed composite diaphragm, the SPL of the fabricated microspeakers shows higher output pressure than those of a tensile-stressed diaphragm. It produces more than 66 dB from 100 Hz to 15 kHz and the highest SPL is about 100 dB at 9.3 kHz with $20V_{peak-to-peak}$, sinusoidal input biases and at 10 mm distances from the fabricated microspeakers to the reference microphone. From the experimental results, it is superior to have a compressively composite diaphragm in order to produce a high SPL in piezoelectric microspeaker.