Low cycle fatigue of single crystal silicon thin films

Silicon will continue to be the critical structure material for micromechanical components for years to come so that reliability must be a key concern. Consequently, in order to ensure reliability design approaches must account for fatigue behavior. This work is aimed at studying the fatigue of single crystal silicon (SCS) thin films by a specially designed method. The films were tested using cantilever microbeam deflection with respect to the effect of loading conditions. To conduct a fatigue test under cyclic strain would be more realistic because many MEMS applications, such as micro-accelerometers and micro-filters, consist of beams vibrating in the same mode. A micro-force testing machine with a micro-probe and specially designed fixtures is used to contact and load the beams under the cyclic strain. Before the fatigue test, the failure strain ɛf of beams in the flexural test is achieved as the testing criterion. In fatigue testing, various percentages of failure strain ɛf, two times of the strain amplitude, are adopted. First of all, fatigue strain–life cycle (S/N) curve is achieved. Further, the curve of fatigue force detected on the SCS versus fatigue life is measured. SEM is also employed to observe the fracture modes of films under fatigue. Based on the SEM observation and force/life curve, the failure mechanism of the fatigued SCS films under the cyclic strain is proposed. This provides a viable method to evaluate the reliability of the SCS.