Silicon Microphone Detects Emergency Vehicle Sirens

Jan. 24, 2023

Infineon’s new microphones can be used in vehicles to detect the direction of a first responder siren.

This video appeared in Electronic Design and has been published here with permission.

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What do you do when you're driving and hear a siren from an ambulance or fire truck? Look around to see where it is so you can adjust your driving accordingly?

Well, Infineon's Scott Winder, Lead Principle Applications Engineer, demonstrates the advantage of the XENSIV MEMS microphone arrays. The array is used to detect a siren or alarm with respect to a vehicle, allowing the driver to know what direction the sound is coming from (see figure).

The MEMS microphone array (lower left) detects the direction of the siren, and the relative direction of the source is shown by the bright LED on the circular display.

This represents just one interesting application of MEMS microphone arrays. They're also used in applications such as smart speakers to detect the location of a person speaking and optimize the recording of the speech in that direction.

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