xMEMS demonstrates rice-sized audio and cooling chips for headphones and smart glasses

xMEMS designs tiny solid-state audio and fan-on-a-chip cooling solutions, and ZDNET's Jada Jones spent an hour testing the company's suite of chips in demos and prototypes. The company says its Cowell and Sycamore microspeakers can replace traditional dynamic drivers. Cowell is already in products such as the Soundpeats Air5 Pro+ and the Creative Aurvana Ace 3 as a tweeter, driven by xMEMS's Aptos2 amplifier; both pieces of hardware are described as nearly as small as a grain of rice.

Sycamore is a one-millimeter-thin MEMS chip xMEMS says can entirely replace dynamic drivers; it is not yet in market but the company expects it within the coming year. In demos the author reported Sycamore produced clear bass without the physical air movement of conventional drivers, and xMEMS provided weight examples—Sycamore at 18 grams versus a 42-gram dynamic driver.

xMEMS also offers Sycamore-N and Sycamore-W variants for smart glasses and smartwatches, and the author said Sycamore-N expanded spatial sound compared with the first-generation Ray‑Ban Meta glasses she uses. xMEMS also demonstrated a fan-on-a-chip for heat management in headphones, smartphones and smart glasses.

The team showed the micro-cooling chip delivering quiet airflow into an earcup and said stacking the chip near a processor reduced a demonstrated surface temperature from about 65 degrees Celsius to 36 degrees Celsius.

Key Topics

Tech, Xmems, Sycamore Chip, Cowell Chip, Micro-cooling Chip, Smart Glasses