A Comparison of Fatigue Tensile Polysilicon Thin Films at Micro-scale Using Single and Parallel Setups

Statistical analyses to estimate strength as well as fatigue lifetime of silicon MEMS structures require a huge amount of testing data. For the aim of increasing the number of fatigue data and saving the time, this paper presents a parallel experimental setup improved from previous setup which was used with only one tensile test structure with four polysilicon thin film specimens at micro-scale. The improved setup allows to perform the tests with two structures and therefore helps to save the expense by using commonly some items. The results obtained from the fatigue tests with this setup were compared to those obtained from single experimental setup by using statistical analysis. The parallel experimental setup is acceptable to perform fatigue tests with the two test structures simultaneously.