Moti Margalit, co-founder and CEO of SonicEdge, joins Sunny Ray to explain how a physicist ends up rebuilding the loudspeaker. The speaker has worked the same way for about 150 years, a membrane that moves and pushes air, and shrinking it degrades the sound. SonicEdge replaces that mechanism with a MEMS chip that vibrates roughly 400,000 times a second to generate ultrasound, then passes it through an acoustic modulator that shifts the frequency down into the audible range, with no mechanical vibration at all. Margalit compares the idea to a Dyson, trading a slow large pump for a very fast small one to move the same air. The chips are built in the same MEMS fabs that produce the accelerometers, gyroscopes and barometers already sitting inside a phone. The company sells as a component to device makers, starting in the research and CTO offices where the physics has to be proven before a product team will commit to a design cycle. Its SonicTwin module, launched at CES 2025, puts a speaker and a microphone in one package measuring eight by four by one millimetres, and because the speaker produces no mechanical vibration there is no crosstalk into the microphone. First commercial products are targeted for early 2027.
A chip that vibrates 400,000 times a second, replacing the moving membrane speakers have used for 150 years.
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