Creative all set to launch game-changing wireless earbuds with solid-state drivers

While wireless earbuds have transformed in terms of feature-set and designs over the last five years, what hasn’t fundamentally changed is the audio drivers they use. Whether it’s budget options that go for under $30 or the best wireless earbuds in the market today, they use the same moving coil drivers with magnets. Of course, the size of the driver and tuning makes a lot of the difference, but the underlying tech is broadly the same across the industry.

That’s set to change over the coming months with the introduction of solid-state silicon drivers. When you think of solid-state tech, what immediately that comes to mind is SSDs; these use silicon-based flash storage modules instead of mechanical drive platters, and are faster than regular HDDs by several magnitudes and much more reliable.

We’re about to see a similar transformation in the audio segment, thanks to xMEMS. The outfit just created a driver that does away with the coil and magnet system that’s been used for over a century, instead relying on a monolithic piezo drive that converts signals into sound. This design sees a silicon diaphragm being used for the speaker, with the piezo layer distributed evenly under the diaphragm surface.

Using a silicon diaphragm means much better stiffness, and because the design uses a voltage-driven system instead of the usual current-based mechanism used by coil and magnet drivers, you get a much faster impulse response. But the biggest differentiator for the true wireless category is that xMEMS’s silicon-based driver is considerably smaller than existing coil drivers, and that allows manufacturers to roll out sleeker designs or offer much better battery life.