Hall, Neal

Biography:

Dr. Neal Hall came to UT Austin from Silicon Audio, LLC, a high-tech venture he co-founded to commercialize state-of-the-art acoustic and seismic sensors with respect to high fidelity and small size.  Dr. Hall served as principal investigator (PI) on several projects including the development of a MEMS-based seismometer for nuclear explosion monitoring (sponsored by DOE), and the development of low-cost, high-performance MEMS microphones that leverage optical-based motion detection principles (sponsored by NSF).    

Before co-founding Silicon Audio, Dr. Hall was an Intelligence Community (IC) postdoc at Sandia National Laboratories where he served as PI on a project with team-members spanning several organizations across Sandia.  Dr. Hall led an optoelectronic integration effort in which acceleration sensing structures fabricated on silicon were integrated with custom vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) and photodiodes fabricated on GaAs to form 1mm3 integrated sensors.

Research Interests

• Silicon micromachining / MEMS
• Acoustics and dynamics 
• Optics and photonics
• Advanced transducer development
• Technology transfer