Mechanical behavior of structures for microelectromechanical systems

Abstract

Our recent efforts to characterize the mechanical behavior of micromachined single crystal silicon structures are presented. These include the design and fabrication of free-standing thin film test structures, micromechanical tensile testing, and a proposed approach to correlate fracture initiation. The latter results in an apparent strength scaling of micromachined silicon structures that has obvious ramifications with regard to the design of reliable MEMS structures without exhaustive testing.