Novel development of the micro-tensile test at elevated temperature using a test structure with integrated micro-heater

This paper describes the novel development of a micro-tensile testing method that allows testing at elevated temperatures. Instead of using a furnace, a titanium/platinum thin film micro-heater was fabricated on a conventional dog-bone-shaped test structure to heat up its gauge section locally. An infrared (IR) camera with 5 mu m resolution was employed to verify the temperature uniformity across the gauge section of the test structure. With this micro-heater-integrated test structure, micro-tensile tests can be performed at elevated temperatures using any conventional tensile testing system without any major modification to the system. In this study, the tensile test of the single crystal silicon (SCS) thin film with (1 0 0) surface orientation and < 110 > tensile direction was performed at room temperature and elevated temperatures, up to 300 degrees C. Experimental results for Young's modulus as a function of temperature are presented. A micro-sized SCS film showed a low dependence of mechanical properties on temperature up to 300 degrees C.