**8. Acknowledgment**

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory managed and operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.

### **9. References**


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**17** 

*Canada* 

Arash Tajik and Hamid Jahed

*University of Waterloo* 

**Standalone Tensile Testing of Thin Film** 

**Materials for MEMS/NEMS Applications** 

The microelectronics industry has been consistently driven by the scaling roadmap, colloquially referred to as the Moore's law. Consequently, during the past decades, integrated circuits have scaled down further. This shrinkage could have never been possible

Thin film materials, on the other hand, are the essential building blocks of the micro- and nano-electromechanical systems (MEMS and NEMS). Utilization of thin film materials provides a unique capability of further miniaturizing electromechanical devices in microand nano-scale. These devices are the main components of many sensors and actuators that perform electrical, mechanical, chemical, and biological functions. In addition to the wide application of thin film materials in micro- and nano-systems, this class of materials has been historically utilized in optical components, wear resistant coatings, protective and

In some applications, thin film materials are used mainly as the load-bearing component of the device. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are the example of these applications. Thin film materials carry mechanical loads in thermal actuators, switches and capacitors in RF MEMS, optical switches, micro-mirror hinges, micro-motors, and many other miniaturized devices. In these applications, one of the main criteria to choose a specific material is its ability to perform the mechanical requirements. Therefore, a clear understanding of the mechanical behavior of thin film materials is of great importance in these applications. This understanding helps better analyze the creep in thermal actuators (Tuck et al., 2005; Paryab et al., 2006), to investigate the fatigue of polysilicon (Mulhstein et al., 2001; Shrotriya et al., 2004) and metallic micro-structures (Eberl et al., 2006; Larsen et al., 2003), to scrutinize the relaxation and creep behavior of switches made of aluminum (Park et al., 2006; Modlinski et al., 2004) and gold films (Gall et al., 2004), to study the hinge memory effect (creep) in micro-mirrors (Sontheimer, 2002), and to address the wear issues in

In some other applications, the thin film material is not necessarily performing a mechanical function. However, during the fabrication process or over the normal life, the device experiences mechanical loads and hence may suffer from any of the mechanical failure issues. Examples of these cases are the thermal fatigue in IC interconnects (Gudmundson & Wikstrom, 2002), strain ratcheting in passivated films (Huang et al., 2002; He et al., 2000), the

without the efficient integration and exploitation of thin film materials.

decorative coatings, as well as thermal barrier coatings on gas turbine blades.

**1. Introduction** 

micro-motors. (van Spengen, 2003)

