Piezoelectric Products Feature Flex Circuits

Piezo ceramics are brittle, difficult to connect electrical leads to, and have no insulating protection to prevent electric shocks (piezos are often driven with 100s of volts). Mide’s piezoelectric products offer piezo wafers sandwiched between thin flexible circuits to help solve these challenges. Called the Piezo Protection Advantage (PPA), Mide typically uses either FR4 (like those in a standard printed circuit board) or Polyimide for the flex circuits, but any circuit material can theoretically be used.

The graphic illustrates a PPA uni-morph (using one piezo) configuration (bi-morph and quad-morph are also available) where a layer of high-temperature polysulfone plastic is used to align the piezo wafers to the copper connections in the flex circuits. The flex circuit then runs the piezo connection out to a convenient electrical termination (connector or solder pads). Finally, a high temperature epoxy is used to adhere all the layers together in the packaging process to encapsulate the high-performance piezo ceramics between copper-clad insulating materials creating a robust, hermetically sealed, electrically insulated transducer with easy connection.