Evolution of acoustic microscopy in the commercial marketplace

Abstract

The promise of Acoustic Microscopy from the 1970s,—to image features and structures of samples from a micromechanical aspect—has found a few niche markets in industry, and, in particular, defect detection in manufactured products. The hope for its widespread application in medicine and pathology has not yet been reached in the commercial market, though there are several pockets of significant biomedical research that employ acoustic microscopy methods. This paper will give this author’s perspective on the field from his 40 years of experience at Sonoscan, Inc., a company originally founded to explore commercial applications, and whose primary activities have found to be serving the semiconductor and microelectronics industries. Based on the original Ultrasonic Absorption Microscope paper by Dunn and Fry in 1959, the early commercial technique substituted a scanning laser as an acoustic detector for their thermocouple probe to produce two dimensional acoustic images.