Fatigue Properties of Surface-Micromachined Al-3%Ti Thin Films

This paper describes new structure of specimen easy to manipulate, align and grip a thin-film and test machine for a fatigue test. High cycle fatigue test has been performed on tensile type specimen of Al-3%Ti alloy using the newly developed fatigue test machine. The material used in this study was Al-3%Ti thin film, which was used in RF MEMS switch. The structure of the suggested specimen has two holes and several bridges. The holes at centre of grip end are able to make alignment and gripping easy. The bridges are to remove the side support strip easily and extract specimen from wafer without sawing. The test machine was developed using the voice coil of speaker. The new tensile loading system has a load cell with maximum capacity of 0.5N and a non-contact position measuring system based on the principle of capacitance micrometry with 0.1nm resolution for displacement measurement. Fatigue tests was performed on 7 specimens. The thickness and width of the thin film of specimen are 1.0μm and 150μm, respectively. The fatigue strength coefficient and the fatigue strength exponent of Al-3%Ti alloy micro-sized specimen are determined to be 164MPa and -0.01322, respectively