Various fatigue testing of polycrystalline silicon microcantilever beam in bending

With the vast potential of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology, the reliability is essential for the successful applications of microdevices. Polycrystalline silicon is one of the most often used structural materials in microdevices. Tension testing for fatigue life of this material has been investigated since past years. This paper presents a micro-actuator-based bending testing system as well as a NITS Tytron250 micro-tensile-force testing machine to study the fatigue of microbeams in bending. The polycrystalline silicon microcantilever beams are fabricated on silicon wafer. The influence of various dimensions and stress on the fatigue endurance is studied when an external force is loaded on the microcantilever beam. The flexural strength of beams are calculated by the ANSYS. Based on the experimental results and ANSYS analysis, it shows that the longer specimen reduces the stresses when the displacement, width and thickness are kept the same. When the width varies, the larger width results in higher stresses. The fatigue life lies between 9.1 x 10(5)-1.53 x 10(7) cycles in use of the testing machine. For microactuator testing experiment, the fatigue life persists up to million cycles without failure. The obtained results are compared with the references of different testing methods.